Transferring money

September 6, 2016 — October 31, 2024

computers are awful together
confidentiality
cryptography
money
Figure 1

Sick of your financial data being used to find out things about you that even you didn’t know?

Sick of usurious international transfer fees?

How do you do international payments without them?

1 Credit cards

They track my expenditure and keep on trying to persuade me that my transactions are fraudulent, which is very frustrating when, e.g. they reason that the last transaction came from a different country because I was in a different country and please could I have that plane ticket after all I want to go home? At the same time, I did get skimmed or phished recently and it was nice that the financial institution was able to return my money quickly.

2 Cryptocurrencies

See cryptocurrencies.

3 Wise

4 Revolut

Revolut trades crypto stocks and foreign currencies while having a debit card and disposable credit cards for privacy preservation.

Australian users: Revolut appears not to support crypto deposits or withdrawals in Australia; this is purely play-money crypto trading, not actual crypto. This fact is not well documented, and as such leads me to revise down my faith in this system.

5 Paypal

Odious company, rather expensive, but widely accepted despite their deficiencies because of lock-in.

6 Envelope full of cash

Usually illegal, AFAICT. Risky.

7 Escrow

Good escrow services? I don’t know, but here are some of unknown quality that I found online.

You can also do this via cryptocurrencies, which offer various escrow systems, but I am not experienced enough in those to make recommendations.

8 Wechat pay

🏗

9 Other alternatives

OKPay? Some kind of augmented mobile-first, developing-nation-friendlier payment system? 🏗