Bitcoin in Africa Could Leapfrog Just Like Cellular Phones Replaced Landline
Werner van Rooyen, head of Business Development and Growth at Bitx, one of Africa’s biggest Bitcoin exchanges, spoke to CoinTelegraph about the problems and potential of Bitcoin in Africa. CoinTelegraph: Bitcoin use in Africa has improved in the last couple of years. What has really changed? Werner van Rooyen: Bitcoin, as measured in the amount of transactions per day, is steadily rising in Africa as it is in the rest of the world. Trading between local currencies and Bitcoin is higher today than it had been a few years back and there’s a big increase in Bitcoin awareness and discussion,....
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In a guest post on Virgin Entrepreneur Dominic Frisby - the author of "Bitcoin: the Future of Money?" - argues that Bitcoin will do to banking what the cell phone did to telecom. Cell phones are technically more advanced and much more flexible than landline phones, and today they offer a lot of new and useful options, but the main reason for the explosive growth of the cell phone market worldwide is financial inclusion. "Quite simply, many people couldn't get access to the basic financial services needed to get a landline. Landlines were, except for pay-phones, credit-based. You needed a....
If bitcoin acceptance reaches a critical mass where necessities of food, shelter, and clothing can be bought with it, it will likely have reached a tipping point where it displaces national currencies. In this scenario, many areas of the world would be leapfrogging banking infrastructure and traditional money wire transfers. Most notably this would describe the financial landscape in developing economies such as the nations of Africa. “The combination of ubiquitous Internet-connected mobile devices and digital currency presents a tremendous opportunity to radically expand access to....
Accelerating Bitcoin adoption, and therefore financial inclusion, in Africa means offering Lightning access through lower-tech phones.
Endaga announced that they completed a $1.2 million round of seed funding, to help advance their mission of bringing cellular access to the more than one billion people around the world who lack it. Endaga's answer to bringing cellular access everywhere is to empower local communities to run cellular networks themselves. There's been a lot of momentum in the international development community to empower local people to solve local problems. The thinking behind local ownership is that that's the best way to ensure sustainable development and growth. In the last five years, the cost of....
There's now a low-cost wireless carrier here in the United States that's willing to accept your bitcoin, litecoin, and yes, even dogecoin to pay for cellular service. They are RingPlus, and chances are you haven't heard of them before. The Los Angeles-based provider offers wireless plans from $1.99 to $33.00 per month, and says they aren't in the business of selling cellular phones. Rather, they're responsible for the coverage, and the end user can use any Sprint-approved device on their network (which if you haven't guessed, appears to piggyback on Sprint's wireless infrastructure). "We....