[DennisP]

Then I think Ethereum could help, down the road a bit. You don't even have to use ether, necessarily; a contract could implement a local time-based currency and do away with your money shortage entirely. Lending circles might help with short-term needs.

For now you'd need a little ether to pay transaction fees, which are getting more significant, and it might be hard to obtain. And scalability could be an issue. But all this stuff is getting addressed:

- With the Metropolis upgrade in a couple months, contracts will be able to hold their own ether and pay the transaction fees with that.

- With the Serenity upgrade in a year or so, transaction fees should lower significantly (for a complicated reason I can explain if anyone's interested). This upgrade will also increase scalability to about 100 tx/sec, and take block time to about 4 seconds.

- With the first sharding upgrade, scalability should get to around 1000 to 10,000 tx/sec, and fees should be even cheaper.

Security of old android phones might be a problem.

[Kametrixom]

> for a complicated reason I can explain if anyone's interested

PoS?

[DennisP]

Proof of stake. Instead of miners trying to make valid hashes, people bet their ether on which blocks will be accepted, and the blocks people bet on the most are the ones that get accepted. (That's Ethereum's PoS design anyway.)

In proof of work, the miners race each other to make blocks. Any time they spend actually validating transactions slows them down; they might find a block and not get their reward if another miner was a bit faster. The transaction fees have to be high enough to compensate for this risk. Since the reward goes up as the coin price goes up, the fees go up proportionally too.

In proof of stake, this race goes away. Blocks are released on a fixed time schedule. The fee no longer has to compensate for risk due to lost time, and instead just has to pay for actual computational cost of the transactions.