I'm curious if people (particularly demultiplexer) think there is some value in Bitcoin for remittances. If you are connected to the financial system, it's easy and cheap to go to IBKR and convert a million USD to EUR in seconds and with just a few dollars in fees. But try to send $200 from the US to Indonesia, especially to someone without a bank account, and your most appealing option might be WesternUnion. Now you're getting screwed on (partially hidden) fees and may face lengthy delays. That's also assuming the recipient has a postal address and ID card, which is often not the case in developing countries.
On the other hand, you can go to a Bitcoin ATM, convert cash into BTC, send it to the recipient, and they can cash out from another ATM. I've seen those things in the weirdest locations, suggesting they meet some demand. It's obviously not BTC's main purpose, but I wonder if there's a way to separate the useful features and turn them into standalone services. Innovation can often start with impracticable products that eventually mature into something useful. (Local versions of Venmo in various Super Apps solve some of the local payment issues, but may not have easy ways to transfer money from outside the country. May be regulation or simply not worth the cost of developing the feature.)
I will answer this question from the perspective of remittances into countries into less well developed countries, not remittances within the "tightly connected financial world", because (with the possible exemption that's the fuckery also known as 'US retail banking') superior solutions exist therein: For example within SEPA interbank transfers connected with a legal entitlement to a basic bank account allows zero-fee transfers that settle within one business day.
When Covid hit some friends and I organized an ad-hoc charitable giving ring leveraged through personal contacts we made over years (in some cases decades) travelling the less-travelled roads of the world. We distributed a total of five-digit sum through it, to which I personally contributed thousands of Euros, to every continent except Antarctica.
So yes, we did have a look at various ways to remit money to underbanked economies, both from a reliability perspective and a costs-of-remittance perspective. The result unequivocally was that the usual players in the remittance market were both cheaper than BTC, more reliable than BTC, and with a verified sender in good standing some of them can execute sub-hour transfers.
Price-wise you have to keep in mind that if you use BTC as a transfer medium for fiat, unless you want to tie the transfer directly to a specific crypto/fiat conversion provider receiver-side (which is a trust issue, and if you do that you might as well use other solutions), you have to eat the tx fee at least two times: One time for the transfer to the recipient, and one time for the transfer between the recipient's wallet and the fiat intermediary. Depending on how crypto is procured at the source you may need to pay a third transfer too.
Those fees are high, and one of the implications of how blockchains work must
remain high due to thread model concerns[0]. Even if those fees were not high, a receiver-side fiat intermediary has risks that need to be paid for, increasing the spread they will charge. A lot of that risk is irreducible and unrelated to BTC, because to any sort of remittance provider has to have access to a certain amount of fiat currency receiver-side, otherwise they simply cannot do their job, but that's also risky due to their local security situation.
In total BTC was more expensive than Western Union (!!), even if you factor in the absolute roger-me-senseless aspect of conversion rates (forget the WU tx fee, except for nominal amounts it is secondary to how they take you to the cleaners with currency conversion). This is true even for countries where BTC ATMs exist, for example Athena in Colombia or Brazil.
Reliability-wise I have to sadly say I now know why WU can charge the fees it charges. It is, without a doubt, one of the most straightforward-to-work-through intermediaries. BTC ATMs were sometimes broken, and if you instead work through local independent operators (there sometimes are people that sell/buy BTC on the side) you must deal with a) can you trust them?, b) do you want to have anything to do with them?, and c) you might need to wait until they have their own buyers for BTC to actually convert them.
There's also the thing that by necessity with any remittance you will need to trust the receiver-side agent to act honestly, which is complicated by the fact that people relying on receiving remittance often have only very limited ability themselves to compel that honesty.
With actors like WU and Remitly you have the advantage that instead the
sender can compel honesty, because they have a contractual relationship (if the local BTC ATM turns out to be a scammer, what do you do as a sender? nothing) with an entity whose self-interest is to maintain their image as reliable agents, and who can come down on local partners getting funny ideas.
You may not like the type of infuence this gives those actors over local conditions, but the fact remains that one of the big providers threatening to close a local partner over malfesance can convince local authority, such as it is, to take action even if they would normally be uninterested. Frankly I don't like that circumstance, but the solution to those problems must necessarily come from something else than BTC.
Time-wise, KYC regs at established places can also have advantages, namely that with accounts in good standing and typical remittance amounts some providers can issue sub-hour to-cash transfers, sometimes even below single block timers.
The lack of official ID on part of the receiver can be a problem, true, but funnily enough sorting that problem out reduces to the same issue as having to find a trustworthy local crypto/fiat intermediary.
So, to recap the without doubt biggest problem to remittances are the local conditions receiver-side, and BTC offers no perspective of resolving those problems in a way that could not also be done without crypto. The same is true for every other aspect of remittances. At the same time BTC creates additional new extra problems, and due to issues inherent in blockchain thread models also fails to compete on price.
[0] Because the integrity of the chain depends on continouous mining the cost required to effect a compromise must exceed the value derivable from a compromise. Since in a transfer network the value of a compromise is a function of the amount of value transferred over a given time frame the whole idea of "reduce mining costs to reduce tx costs so we can have more tx value" is either an outright pipe-dream (proof of work) or will at best reproduce classical banking structures or at worst rentier oligarchy (proof of stake).
