1/3 of Kenyans use M-Pesa, a mobile money transferring platform. M-Pesa recently added support for bitcoin. So while 1/3 of Kenyans have a bitcoin wallet, most of them may not even be aware of this fact.
They have added nothing of the sort, as far as I can determine. A bitcoin site added M-Pesa as an option for payment. If there is any official affiliation, I'd like to see the proof. No mention of bitcoins or Kipochi appears on http://www.mpesa.in/
You may as well say that 2/3 of Americans have a Paypal account because they have a credit card.
I've seen several articles now that heavily imply that this is an official M-Pesa service, which smells a bit scummy to me, if not outright scammy.
Edit:
On their blog they explicitly state: "The Kipochi to M-Pesa service is operated by an independent 3rd party company in Kenya and is not directly affiliated with Safaricom the owners of M-Pesa."
This is not an official integration with M-Pesa. M-Pesa users don't automatically have a bitcoin wallet either.
There have been a small handful of good journalists covering the story, but way too many try to fit it into their very tiny world view and invent things that sound cool.
Unfortunately these kinds of sensationalist stories can cause us or anyone else working with Bitcoin problems in the future.
This could be a huge disrupter to the ~$40B African remittance market. "In all of Western Africa...70 per cent of payments are handled by one money transfer operator [1]." I have a hard time believing that stat will hold with the M-pesa network linked up to the Bitcoin network.
Don't you like that part about technology/disruption? Normally, it would need to trickle down, which means some countries would always be decades behind others when it comes to a certain type of infrastructure or technology.
But thanks to disruption, not only can some countries completely skip one or two types of technology at once, and jump straight to the latest one, but sometimes they can actually get ahead of the "developed" countries, especially if those countries are too "entrenched" with a certain technology, and it resists moving on to the new disruptive one (so basically the same rules of disruptions that apply to companies, apply to countries, too).
If Bitcoin keeps going to achieve its true potential, I could see how the first country to declare Bitcoin as its national currency, wouldn't be a "developed country", but an African country or something.
Firstly, saying one third of kenyans use M-Pesa doesn't really reflect its impact fully - from the Economist's article on mobile money in East Africa last week:
"17m of Kenya’s 19m adults are signed up to M-PESA. Cash equivalent to nearly one-third of Kenya’s GDP washes through the service."
Ultimately, the move toward less regulated currency is driven by the Kenyan Government's decision to tax M-Pesa transactions by 10% which threatens to tip them towards no longer being the most efficient way to move money. This is just a clever work-around to the poor regulation of mobile money.
Mpesa can be loaded with online banking which means fraud potential if you can convert it to BTC. Converting BTC to Mpesa is no problem because they are guaranteed funds, so money remittance is a real possibility but yeah no evidence this is happening
I've been hoping since early days of Bitcoin that it will eventually get used in some countries in Africa, where inflation can be rampant, and something like Bitcoin could actually offer "stability".
The only problem was that you need at least a smartphone to make it work - and electricity to keep charging those smartphones. But I think some of the countries are getting there and are starting to meet the prerequisites.
Very excited about this. I'm friends with one of the cofounders. Think remittances as a huge market for this. Also look at companies like Xoom that this takes on. or western union.
I'm the CTO of Kipochi who is rolling out this service in Africa.
First of all this article greatly exaggerates things.
Anyone with a mobile data enabled phone theoretically has a bitcoin wallet using our service. We are rolling out feature phone specific services as well, but roll out is limited by operators.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 28.8 ms ] threadYou may as well say that 2/3 of Americans have a Paypal account because they have a credit card.
I've seen several articles now that heavily imply that this is an official M-Pesa service, which smells a bit scummy to me, if not outright scammy.
Edit: On their blog they explicitly state: "The Kipochi to M-Pesa service is operated by an independent 3rd party company in Kenya and is not directly affiliated with Safaricom the owners of M-Pesa."
http://kipochi.com/blog
This is not an official integration with M-Pesa. M-Pesa users don't automatically have a bitcoin wallet either.
There have been a small handful of good journalists covering the story, but way too many try to fit it into their very tiny world view and invent things that sound cool.
Unfortunately these kinds of sensationalist stories can cause us or anyone else working with Bitcoin problems in the future.
[1] http://www.ifad.org/remittances/maps/africa.htm
But thanks to disruption, not only can some countries completely skip one or two types of technology at once, and jump straight to the latest one, but sometimes they can actually get ahead of the "developed" countries, especially if those countries are too "entrenched" with a certain technology, and it resists moving on to the new disruptive one (so basically the same rules of disruptions that apply to companies, apply to countries, too).
If Bitcoin keeps going to achieve its true potential, I could see how the first country to declare Bitcoin as its national currency, wouldn't be a "developed country", but an African country or something.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yztBoNQRYo
"17m of Kenya’s 19m adults are signed up to M-PESA. Cash equivalent to nearly one-third of Kenya’s GDP washes through the service."
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21579870...
Ultimately, the move toward less regulated currency is driven by the Kenyan Government's decision to tax M-Pesa transactions by 10% which threatens to tip them towards no longer being the most efficient way to move money. This is just a clever work-around to the poor regulation of mobile money.
The only problem was that you need at least a smartphone to make it work - and electricity to keep charging those smartphones. But I think some of the countries are getting there and are starting to meet the prerequisites.
First of all this article greatly exaggerates things.
Anyone with a mobile data enabled phone theoretically has a bitcoin wallet using our service. We are rolling out feature phone specific services as well, but roll out is limited by operators.