Mexico has seen a new all-time high trading volume on localbitcoins. This comes out on the back of the announcement from the Trump Whitehouse that remittance payments of Mexican migrants in the United States of America will potentially be the target of new restrictions essentially ending the possibility of Mexican migrant workers to be able to cheaply send money back home to their families.
Mexico adopting Bitcoin:
Mexico has been experiencing a massive increase in the number of transactions on localbitcoins. Mexican migrant workers are believed to be exploited by the remittance companies which are charging around 10% fees. What is essentially being discussed here by the Trump Whitehouse is a new tax on these migrant workers. The number that they are currently floating around is a 3% tax on the remittances going from the USA to Mexico. This may not seem super crazy but considering the $33.4 billion which were sent to Mexico in 2018 alone, that extra 3% could mean $1 billion more per year for the United States government.
98% of the transactions that were sent during the last year, were sent via electronic means which means that there is actually a very strong remittance route that is ready for mass disruption going from the United States to Mexico and Bitcoin could be the perfect answer. However, the average size of a remittance payment from the United States to Mexico is $322 last year and the problem is that if the fees rise again exponentially on bitcoin, then bitcoin might not be the ideal cryptocurrency for these kinds of smaller remittance payments. Maybe we are going to see some other cryptocurrency being adopted in that situation. But regardless of which cryptocurrency is used, we can see that there is a clear need for disruption as government policies again seeks to impede or overly exploit the free float of money.
