I teach English in China and get paid cash Chinese Yuan (CNY), or locally its called, Renminbi 人民币, (RMB), (in English that means People’s Currency). There's a tight restriction on how much a foreigner can exchange, a maximum of $500 USD a day, and international transfers are slow, to both set up and process, bureaucratic and expensive.
In this post I'm going to show you how to use Bitcoin to make sending money home from China free from limits, fast, simple and cheap.
There are only two conventional ways to transfer money abroad from China that I know of..
Deposit the money in a Chinese friend’s bank account and then they transfer the money to your bank account in your home country. This process involves a lot of paperwork at the bank, bank fees, and takes a long time to set up and a long time to go through.
Use Western Union who appear to have a monopoly on remittances. This takes about an hour at the bank, first you have to fill in a lengthy form with all your personal information, have your passport copied, exchange up to the limit of $500 per day into USD, and pay a fee of $15 to send it to a receiver, who then has to go and physically pick up the USD which is exchanged again into local currency and then deposit the cash into your bank account account on your behalf.
But using the magic of Bitcoin, there is no limit to the amount you can send, the fees are nominal, it’s fast, and you don’t need to involve anyone else in transferring, collecting or carrying cash for you.
I use two websites to do this and I’m going to walk you through the exact steps I take. If you're not from the UK, or even not in China, you can still use this exact same method to send money from anywhere to your bank account in your native country.
First of all I log in to localbitcoins
https://localbitcoins.com/buy-bitcoins-online/?ch=6zxw
And go to my favourite sellers profile and place an order for bitcoin:
Sellers build trust on localbitcoins with a feedback system, and a dispute can be filed if you have any problems. Cutebee is my favourite seller, she doesn’t have the lowest rate but close to it but I buy from her every time because she has never let me down and always releases the bitcoin within an hour.
Once you’ve placed your order, the bitcoin is placed in escrow and you have 90 minutes to deposit the money in one of the sellers accounts. As I have cash, I pop to the bank down the road and deposit it into her account using a cash deposit machine.
I go back home, take a photo of the receipt from the machine with my phone, click the button on the order page to confirm I have made the payment attach it to a message to her on the same page.
The seller then confirms that he or she has received the payment and releases the bitcoin to your localbitcoins bitcoin wallet.
Next I log into BitStamp
http://bitstamp.net
(You will need to verify your Bitstamp account before you can use it by clicking on the Account tab, then Verify Account from the menu on the left and submitting copies of the requested documents. )
click on the Deposit tab
and click on Bitcoin from the menu on the left
I copy that address e.g 3DdAU1FMDuG4vrH9zKuJQ5nyBMYemLE2tS
Then go back to localbitcoins, click on my bitcoin balance in the top right hand corner, and send the amount I want to deposit into my UK bank account to the Bitstamp deposit address.
Once that has arrived, I click on the Withdrawal tab:
And select EU Bank (SEPA) from the menu on the left
If you want to send it to a bank outside of the EU click on International Bank instead.
“International withdrawals will be charged with 0.09% fee, minimum fee is 15.00 USD/EUR on Bitstamp's end and may incur additional international bank fees. Minimum amount for international withdrawal is 50.00 USD/EUR.”