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Kenyans Will Soon Be Able To Send Bitcoin By Phone
jfruh writes "M-Pesa is a wildly popular mobile payment system in Kenya, which allows citizens of a country with a poor banking infrastructure to easily transfer money to each other using ubiquitous dumbphones. Currently the system only works in the local currency, but there are plans afoot to allow users to transfer Bitcoin — which would help Kenyans working abroad send money back home without paying high international bank transfer fees."
Now it won't cost you so much to help them smuggle their vast fortune out of the country.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Here comes a whole new spate of 419-style "My client was a prince who died with a huge bunch of bitcoins and I need help smuggling them out of the country, please help..." scam emails.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Having lived in Kenya for 5 years, actually MPESA, and the mobile networks in general, are much better than what's in the West. You can transfer money to anyone, anytime, with any phone. Transfer to and from your bank account. Signal strength is consistently 100% in any town of any significance. Fast Internet even in many places away from towns. PAYG calls 1c or 2c/minute, Internet 1c/Mb or less, tethering included on PAYG. Coming back to the West meant getting used to rather inferior service!
David Anderson
Or something like that.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Cue the Bit419 emails.
But seriously, this is a step in the right direction. The allure of Bitcoin to me isn't even the privacy (which is debatable) it's that, by not having "central" anything, it truly democratizes access to currency. Forget the hoarders, the conversions and the "banks"; this is a means to transfer money that everyone should have access to.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
BTC is a hilariously unstable currency.
I have witnessed it halve, then double, then more then halve, then slightly double in the span of a single month. Absolutely nothing is guaranteed in BTC, and to make things even worse the exchanges (which you need to turn your BTC into something usable out in the real world- sorry, but ordering pizza and black market goods is hardly considered "useful") are notoriously unreliable as well. There is literally nothing propping up the system and protecting it from evaporating overnight.
Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting experiment, but it's just that- an experiment, and to a certain extent a very clever money making scheme for those who got in early. I spent over a week researching the potential profitability of investing in some serious ASIC mining hardware- and in the end, while it might have been profitable to invest... I just couldn't convince myself that the market or the exchanges were trustworthy. Actually turning BTC into IRL currency (which BTC is not) is a total hit and miss. Basically, BTC can't be trusted for anything more then hobby cash.
So I guess if you're desperate enough, maybe it'll be a useful tool for these folks, but I'm not holding my breath for the inevitable story about how all the poor Kenyans lost their hard worked money and made all their families starve because the market crashed and Mt. Gox decided to evaporate overnight and run away with whatever cash they had.
The summary made it sound like the M-Pesa system was going to add support for bitcoin somehow ("there are plans afoot to allow users to transfer Bitcoin"), but from TFA, it's just an unrelated third party offering a service that lets you buy bitcoin and pay via M-Pesa.
Essentially some guy put up a website where you can buy bitcoin.
without paying high international bank transfer fees
This is VERY interesting. In my country banks work hard to steal every penny from anyone who needs to send or receive money from abroad
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time