Is 'hawala' and Bitcoin similar?
The major difference is, while Hawala means trust, Bitcoin does not depend on trust. Everything is made of cryptographical signatures, making it 100%** safe, while Hawala cannot / may not be trusted.



** Two exceptions: 1) Majority of hashrate is attacking the network. See this 2) The theoretically possible, but practically impossible hash collisions. It doesn't happens, while the theoretical safety isn't 100%, rather 99.999999999...%