[rbreve]

You live in a bubble, your argument is not valid for millions of people that don’t have bank accounts, have you seen western union fees? Africa and Latin America will embrace cryptocurrencies because it will be faster and cheaper and will not require people to open a bank account, only a cell phone with data which most people already have

[dang]

Probably this got downvoted because of the "you live in a bubble" part, which crosses into personal attack. Could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit those bits out of what you post here? This comment would be just fine without it.

[rbreve]

Oh sorry, I wasn't attacking.

[toomuchtodo]

Payments in developing countries is already fast through the use of mobile phones, no cryptocurrency overhead required.

[rbreve]

Fast but with very expensive fees, and the problem is also corruption, privacy, and abuse by banks and financial institution. With the blockchain beeing decentralized you wont get ripped off and you won't get tracked either (in a way) Also, imagine if Trump decides to ban or tax transfers from USA to LatinAmerica/Africa, then crypto will be the solution.

[QML]

Which apps or companies are these? I have not heard of widespread use of mobile payments in developing countries besides China.

[toomuchtodo]

Africa: https://www.pymnts.com/news/mobile-payments/2016/mobile-paym...

Latin America: http://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/10231/latin-america-warms...

[skybrian]

If you know more, could you share? I haven't read anything about cryptocurrency being successful in Africa or Latin America. (Versus, say, M-Pesa in Kenya.)

[rbreve]

look it up, there are a lot of articles about it

[pshin45]

To add to this point, M-Pesa has been a huge success in Kenya, but has had trouble expanding to other countries because of some inherent limitations of M-Pesa's model.

A cryptocurrency could enable the next evolution of mobile payment services like M-Pesa. I touched on this in a past blog post:

https://medium.com/@petershin45/hate-bitcoin-this-might-chan... (You can scroll down to the section titled "How Bitcoin can help the poor and unbanked")