Kenyans Will Soon Be Able To Send Bitcoin By Phone 83
jfruh writes "M-Pesa is a wildly popular mobile payment system in Kenya, which allows citizens of a country with a poor banking infrastructure to easily transfer money to each other using ubiquitous dumbphones. Currently the system only works in the local currency, but there are plans afoot to allow users to transfer Bitcoin — which would help Kenyans working abroad send money back home without paying high international bank transfer fees."
You too can gamble with the instability of BTC! (Score:2, Interesting)
BTC is a hilariously unstable currency.
I have witnessed it halve, then double, then more then halve, then slightly double in the span of a single month. Absolutely nothing is guaranteed in BTC, and to make things even worse the exchanges (which you need to turn your BTC into something usable out in the real world- sorry, but ordering pizza and black market goods is hardly considered "useful") are notoriously unreliable as well. There is literally nothing propping up the system and protecting it from evaporating overnight.
Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting experiment, but it's just that- an experiment, and to a certain extent a very clever money making scheme for those who got in early. I spent over a week researching the potential profitability of investing in some serious ASIC mining hardware- and in the end, while it might have been profitable to invest... I just couldn't convince myself that the market or the exchanges were trustworthy. Actually turning BTC into IRL currency (which BTC is not) is a total hit and miss. Basically, BTC can't be trusted for anything more then hobby cash.
So I guess if you're desperate enough, maybe it'll be a useful tool for these folks, but I'm not holding my breath for the inevitable story about how all the poor Kenyans lost their hard worked money and made all their families starve because the market crashed and Mt. Gox decided to evaporate overnight and run away with whatever cash they had.