Introducing Rebittance.org
Over the past two months, we’ve been quietly pushing the term “rebittance” to describe a style of Bitcoin-powered money transfer that begins with BTC and ends with local fiat currency, and today we launched the first version of an informational one-pager that explains how it works and how it compares with traditional bank-to-bank money transfer. The website’s goal is to inform people that there is in fact another way available to them, and also to help them make more informed choices when performing comparisions between various providers.
Over the next few months we’re going to continue adding more content to this site as we collect more information from our experiences running Rebit.ph, and the experiences of other Bitcoin remittance providers who would like to share their own learnings.
The notion of being able to save over 85% of the cost of transmission in a market that is US$436 billion in size is a very powerful one, and there have been plenty of discussions regarding where those savings could be most effectively redirected.
Back in 2011, Bill Gates famously said that a savings of 50% would free up about US$15B for developing nations to use somewhere else (healthcare or education, for example) and although average global remittance costs have fallen from 10% to 8% since then, it’s hardly falling fast enough. This is where Bitcoin comes in.
We envisioned Rebittance.org as a jump-off point for first-timers whose interest in cryptocurrency is purely about the money transfer aspect. These folks don’t care nearly as much about the public keys and mining and hashes and consensus platforms, and thus, we are unable to direct them to the traditional “Learning Bitcoin” resources.
Rebittance.org is an attempt to be the first step for these people, and as we collect feedback on it over the next few months, we hope that it will eventually be the definitive hub for this kind of knowledge.