As it happens, I just recently transferred funds internationally. It took 36 hours to clear, at a guaranteed rate. My local bank charged about $8 in fees (mostly for the overhead of liaising with the local receiver of revenue - there's a bunch of paperwork, so I can't really object to the fee). My point is that if you're paying absurd taxes and taking a week, you might be able to find a better option.

By contrast BTC, in the same timeframe, dropped more than 10%. If I'd been using it to transfer the same funds, I'd have been massively out of pocket.

There are strong arguments for disintermediating financial systems, but we don't need to overhype the problem space, and let's not kid ourselves that Bitcoin is a silver bullet either.

Except that Bitcoin takes roughly 10 minutes to clear the first block, so that's invalid comparison. There is zero paperwork with cryptos, so that's better. Other users gain more than 10% at times, so that's invalid. And fees are almost universally both less and flat... better. Instead of whining about volatility, understand that cryptos are not centrally manipulated like fiat, and right now are quite thin compared to fiat... so volatility is expected there as perfectly normal price and market discovery mechanism. Want less volatility, hold and use more cryptos with more people. Long term they'll be better and won't go to shit when your country of choice flips upside down. As far as tor goes, many cryptocurrencies can run over tor... pick a few and run some of their nodes as onions or i2p's. zensystem.io has perhaps gone farthest with work therein. You can send all the clearing time and former fees saved to this address in the form of golden bullets... btc:141nbtnunoix7kKjbAspmZVCPamP9rgJST