Quote from Hoi:
Let me give you an example what happened to me a few weeks ago.
A good friend Skyped me from South Africa (he emigrated a few years back from the Netherlands), and at some point Bitcoin was discussed. I explained him some of the benefits, and then he asked me if he could use it for transporting his monthly income from the Netherlands to his bank in Capetown. As this took days and each time he had to pay 40 Euros to the banks involved. I don't know, I said...40 Euro's isn't that much (compared the 10-20% fees WesterUnion charges), but still he insisted to try it (just as experiment) and asked me how to proceed. It took some days to setup an Bitstamp-account, as well as an exchange in Capetown (don't know the name, but they offered a straight link to his bank-account converting BTC into Rand). A few days ago we tried it with 300 Euro (Dutch-bank SEPA to bitstamp, then exchange to BTC, transport to Capetown exchange, and to Rand on his Bank-account).
We were both surprised that that the total fee was only 1 dollar. This partly because of the BTC-exchange rate in Capetown is higher than Bitstamp.
Our conclusion was that it's doable but (still) too much work for earning 39 dollar. Still, for people using WesternUnion it will be a game changer (which is a 400 trillion dollar market). And it surely will, when paying with BTC is accepted all over the world (in which case exchanges to EUR and Rand aren't needed anymore).
And of course BTC's price should stabilize which will happen if we enter the right-side of the S-curve.
Just stop telling it's useless, it has real-life properties.