Quote from: Mavrick on January 22, 2014, 06:47:42 AM

Quote from: ArticMine on January 22, 2014, 12:50:08 AM

If I can make a suggestion coming from Canada, a developed first world country it is this:

Create a service that makes it easy for people in Africa to receive payments in BTC and have those payments converted to local payment systems that the local people use much like Bit-pay does for merchants. A good example would be a BTC to M-PESA gateway for people in Kenya.

Let us say Bob in Kenya needs to receive payments from Alice in Canada. Bob would sign up with the service in Kenya and is provided with a custom web page on a site in Kenya and a password for a sender to use. Bob does not need to have Internet access. Bob then provides the password and the site url to Alice. This can even be done by regular (snail) mail. Alice then logs into the site with the password provided by Bob. Alice is provided with a Bitcoin address to send funds to Bob. After say 3 confirmations the M-PESA credit shows up on Bob's phone.

The key here is that the service in Kenya does not need to concern itself with how Alice obtains the BTC or learn how to use BTC or for that matter what the regulatory requirements are in Canada. Leave that up to the Bitcoin community in Canada. Replace Canada by any other "rich" country and one immediately sees the benefit Bitcoin can provide here.

I mention this because I still recall a situation 18 months ago. I was waiting in line at the local Post Office, ironically to pick up some documents I needed for my MTGox account. The fellow in front to me wanted to send 70 CAD to someone in Kenya. I could not avoid to overhear that it cost him in the neighbourhood of 10 CAD in fees. Do the math please.

this is brilliant you see we don't have the processing power or the actual electricity to mine as the rest of the world yay for power cuts.
this is what i am talking about ways Africa can enter the conversation! so thank you for the meaningful input.

You don't need to mine to make an impact in the bitcoin world. Go look at zSIM, being run by seedco.in - it replaces M-PESA with bitcoins. There's also potential bitcoin ideas regarding banking, money transfer, secure messaging and much more.

You just need to come up with an idea that's suitable for your local area, a willing group of programmers and business people and make it happen!