The Philippines was poised to be the third-biggest remittance-receiving country last year with $32.8 billion, after India ($65.4 billion) and China ($62.9 billion), according to World Bank.
Similarly, with BPO and related jobs, numerous foreign companies are offshoring parts (or even whole) of their businesses here to freelancers and companies.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas has established brief guidelines for bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) usage in the country. There’s no more beneficial time for Filipinos to dabble in bitcoins than now. Here's why:
PayPal clearance takes 3 – 5 business days before the money gets transferred to your savings bank account.
Besides, whereas you require to physically transact with the bank, unlike with Bitcoin – you just need an Internet to transact online in Bitcoin.
When you receive bitcoins, the coins arrive in your digital wallet. If you choose to send the bitcoin to a Coins. pH or Bitbit.coach wallet, you can change it to pesos by a quick click of a button.
The Philippines is very well known to be the top provider of Overseas Workers. Most Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) send their remittances via PayPal. If an OFW sends a 50,000 pesos ($1000) via PayPal, the transfer fee may cost at least 2,500 pesos ($50). While in that respect there is no VAT in remittances under the proposed tax laws of the 2016 PH administration, the transfer fees will continue. With Bitcoins, the fees are very minimal.
While the stock market is closed on weekends, Bitcoin is traded and mined 24/7. The value of Bitcoin against the Philippine Peso fluctuates day and nighttime. Even then, there is a relative trend and with enough knowledge, you can predict if it will continue going up or breaking down. It is like the Peso-Dollar exchange rate. Sometimes the Peso is weak against the dollar, sometimes it isn’t. If someone sends you 50 dollars, you have the option to hold that 50 dollars until its value in Pesos goes up.
A similar trend happens with bitcoin against the Peso, and you can get advantage of it. If somebody sends you bitcoin, instead of cashing it out in Pesos immediately, you can keep it a little while longer and wait for a favorable exchange rate. Or so people even hold Bitcoins far longer like what we behave with our money deposited in the money box. This is in hopes that the bitcoin’s future PHP value will be more than what it is worth today.
While the emergence of Bitcoin has sparked a debate about its future and that of other cryptocurrencies. Personally, I think that the benefits far outweigh the doubts, on why you should consider bitcoin in your everyday dealings.
