Have you personally used Bitcoin?

Instant Buy/Sell takes care of that. In classical cases I can tell you, of people wanting to remit money from the US to their home country. They buy bitcoins (or bitcoin equivalent), hit send, the receiver receives it in their wallet and then proceeds to cash out the bitcoin value at the time of booking to the recipient. Because this takes 10-15 minutes, price fluctuations do happen, and it can either go against you, or for you, hence the spreads are slightly wider (1%-1.5% more than average). They then proceed to sell their bitcoins at an exchange of their choice, and eventually will scrape the funds back to them.

In very ideal world (read: slow day) this is beautiful. Just a couple of days ago when the price rose from US$ 270 to US$ 303 and then dropped down, those would be bad days to trade on Bitcoin as a value transfer. This is where Ripple rules.