Is this a bait and switch too? For CAD/USD transactions, www.peerfx.com has been operating for almost 2 years now, supposedly on similar principles. At the beginning, the peerfx rates were really goood, but now they've got a 1% spread and a 0.5% fee. Better than what you can get at a bank if you take their posted rate, but worse than the bank's "premium" rate.

I think the difference between www.peerfx.com and currancyfair is that the later is already doing transactions peer to peer while according to peerfx they have not launched a p2p service yet. Maybe peerfx.com where too fast with a MVP.

I thought it was something like Bitcoin reading the title.

If they execute and market well they should be huge

Do we need banks? Normally when we transfer money the bank gets nearly 5% on the spread. And it looks like they are only charging $4 per transfer.

Possibly not, any more - banks are supposed to provide economic liquidity by moving capital around the economy to where it's needed and buffering shortfalls (never mind what they've actually been getting up to of late, that's what their economic functions is).

I would imagine that you could do that peer-to-peer, possibly on a largely micro-lending basis, using the internet, creating a newer, distributed mechanism for keeping the economy liquid and shifting capital to where it's needed. I would imagine that you could engineer a significantly more fluid system this way - and as a bonus, no element would be 'to big to fail'.

Not sure how you'd get there though; bit boil the oceans really. Maybe just keep doing more micro-financing and see what happens.