Quote from: thx1164 on May 16, 2013, 04:47:08 PM

Quote from: Theraty on May 16, 2013, 04:28:27 PM

Quote from: stripykitteh on May 16, 2013, 10:25:43 AM

Quote from: stripykitteh on May 16, 2013, 09:03:54 AM

I'm interested in what happened in Africa in the 1990's and 2000's. In many parts there infrastructure is poor, and liable to being unmaintained, stolen, or destroyed by conflict. Many parts of Africa have good mobile phone networks, though, as they're relatively cheap to deploy and can be deployed in numbers to provide redundancy (or even just moved around on trucks). If you said to a villager in many parts of Africa that his mobile phone can generate $2 a day if it does Bitcoin, he'd probably offer his daughter to you.

I've had a couple more thoughts riffing on this idea over a glass of wine. Yes, it is after 5 where I am.

Make the chips as cheap as possible, maybe even *pay* mobile phone makers to bundle them into handsets.

Consider collaborating with other leading Bitcoin miners to fund development. Design goals are the best performance possible with low power. It will be designed to go into a cheap phone, so sleek design is not so important, i.e., the phone might be a "brick" with a larger battery.

Great idea. The bitcoins on phone can be changed to credit automatically. A phne that makes its own free credit.

In some places in Africa, cell phone minutes are actually used as a type of currency. Once someone figures out how to implement this idea (although I am skeptical until batteries can put out a lot more juice), OR trade bitcoins via SMS, I think we will have a MASSIVE market that opens up in Africa.

Not just in Africa, the whole world really. Everyone uses cellphones and everyone wants free minutes.