Not only is Western Union significantly less reliable and significantly more expensive, as someone who gets paid in crypto the most expensive and painful parts of my finances are those that touch the traditional banking system at all.
> significantly less reliable and significantly more expensive
Going to need a citation on those two claims. You can lookup fees for both, right now BTC fees are about one USD more than a WU transfer. WU is subject to banking laws and if you're going to claim it's "unreliable", you're going to need to provide some evidence of that. It's literally their business, and a heavily regulated one at that.
Or you could provide some counter evidence. At the time of this writing, sending $100 to Algeria (it was on top of the list) via WU is a flat $8 fee. Currently BTC transaction fees today are $9.94. So yes, it is literally cheaper and you don't have to guess about the numbers.
BTC transaction fees are greater than WU, it takes longer, and of course you need to deal with BTC. At the US side you're still beholden to all the AML and KYC issues that you'd need to deal with anyway, again unless you are doing it illegally.
Show me the "unbanked" who can use BTC but somehow cannot walk up to a WU stand with cash in hand. It's a preposterous argument.
I just used this for $3000 to Algeria and I get $14.99 plus an absurdly bad exchange rate of 120 DZD where the bank rate is 134, so basically another 10.5% fee, which means $300 lost.
Frankly I think you have no clue what you are talking about if you somehow believe Western Union is superior in functionality and utility to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin transaction fee is currently equivalent to $7.60 and that is a flat fixed fee for any amount, even $1M worth.
Additionally there are multiple Bitcoin exchanges operating in Algeria, https://www.bitrawr.com/algeria
and you won’t lose anything in exchange rates in local currency transactions.
