On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:24:29PM -0700, Michael Nelson wrote:
Heard Rajiv Shah, president of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), on NPR this morning say that as the financial infrastructure was lacking in Afghanistan, it was non-trivial to pay people. So they had a couple of pilot programmes where people were "paid on their mobile phones".
What do you think this entails? The lack of infrastructure that makes Western style payment possible, would also make a mobile phone solution difficult (you have to use something accessible via your phone, in order to get afghanis in your hand in some local place).
Places without infrastructure doesn't mean places without mobile access. The mobile phone is the de facto computer in most of Africa and Asia. Some poor villages have only one phone (with multiuser OS) they paid for. It's pretty obvious that the mobile phone will become a payment system shortly, also in the developed world. Notice that a mobile phone with NFC or accelerometer bumping or audio modem or even Bluetooth would allow local transactions, including Bitcoin clients. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE