Obviously not Bitcoin

[Eugen Leitl]

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
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