Kipochi, a Bitcoin wallet service, now supports M-Pesa
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
"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.
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.
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.