So when I discovered Bitcoin and traded for a while, the difficulty of trading from East Africa got me thinking about a local exchange. However, after more research and consideration, I figured that speculation isn't really the best use for crypto-currencies. So I began developing a mobile-payment system using Bitcoin (or some other coin with a similar protocol). And with my team at Funtrench Limited - www.funtrench.com, we've done a lot of the work and managed to raise 1.1 BTC through Bitbond.net www.bitbond.net. We even got featured on their blog http://blog.bitbond.net/interview-feature-borrower-funtrench/.

We're now raising more funds there to finish up and launch. The loan ID is 15KQRM3DBZ, and we have very faithfully repaid our previous loan. So we're not trying to solicit funds directly, but rather through a site that actually verifies our identity and establishes that we are credible. Anyone who wants to help us set up our mobile payments system can do so through bitbond.net.

Dude, I live in Nairobi. Born and raised. I make software and deploy for Kenyan clients in Kenya.  

The new site is coming up here http://funtrench.com/

I did not say it has any meaning as a debt instrument. I simply pointed out what the word means as I have used it. We're running an exchange, we already have clients, we have little or no competition, and we're requesting a loan through a provider who has done due diligence and established our identity - including verifying our income. Just like any bank or credit institution would grant a loan after verifying income and identity. Regardless of what happens to our exchange, we can pay based on income that has been verified by bitbond.net.

While I understand the relative paranoia that permeates the Bitcoin community, our understanding is that Bitcoin can work very well in certain scenarios as a payment method, and the exchange is simply part of that long-term plan. On our end we see it as a way of growing the Bitcoin economy, and making it useful as more than a commodity. Paranoia guards against loss of Bitcoin, but it certainly doesn't move the community away from being a small elitist 1st world thing. I suppose you are welcome to suspect the loan, but I can assure you that we will still get Bitcoin into East Africa.

Guarantee - a formal assurance (typically in writing) that certain conditions will be fulfilled.

Just a little time to go before our time on Bitbond is up. Anyone willing to invest in the project earns interest and is guaranteed payment. We requested for 9 BTC, and throughout the loan period we will update investors on progress and revenue. We were featured on the bitbond.net blog at https://blog.bitbond.net/2013/11/interview-feature-borrower-funtrench/ and I assure you we are a legitimate business in Kenya.

Invest now!

The exchange will be based in Nairobi where my company is located and will initially accept deposits in Kenya shillings. Deposits will be made via M-Pesa, a mobile money system which is commonly used in Kenya. To get around the issue of obtaining Bitcoin, after the initial investment we intend to obtain Bitcoin by working with European contacts to buy in cash. Our plan will build on a reliably running exchange to expand into money transfer via Bitcoin.

My company - Funtrench Limited - is setting up an exchange for Bitcoin and 3 alt-coins in Kenya. It's pretty difficult to obtain Bitcoin (even with money) from East Africa because most banks don't have linkage with the major online money services that are acceptable on most exchanges. Virwox used to be an option, but their payment gateway provider (Skrill) is blocking transactions and actually returning funds to credit cards. Of course to keep Bitcoin accessible to every part of the world (especially in places where mobile money is prevalent) we think the solution is a homegrown exchange that accepts local currency and provides ordinary guys with the opportunities to obtain, use and even invest in Bitcoin. We've linked up with some offshore guys to do bulk purchases/sale of Bitcoin and so we should be able to achieve Gox-like popularity within the local context.

We're sourcing investment on bitbond.net where investors would have a chance to earn interest and help out with this project. Our listing is at https://www.bitbond.net/buyer/listings with the ID S3AN134R8. We are confident of our market research and capacity to pull this off relatively quickly with the intention of ensuring all businesses that accept mobile money payments (like 80% of businesses in Kenya) can also accept Bitcoin. It's time Bitcoin became a currency, not just an asset.

Anyone with interest in providing us with additional venture capital (in Bitcoins) can contact me.

Inputs.io was recently hacked, and this points to the increasingly urgent problem of online storage of assets. Having to place trust in an online, pseudo-anonymous third-party is going back to centralized banking without the legal protections that traditional banking has. Hardware wallets, or revolutionary new ways of holding money online safely are long overdue. A wallet based on a mobile phone, with strong linkage to the phone number may be a valid solution, because the way M-PESA works depends on phone number as the security.

A MAC address can also be a unique identifier to tie a wallet to, ensuring that it can only be used from a particular device or list of devices. Such measures may make the stealing of wallets pretty much a pointless exercise.

It may seem that centralization of the bitcoin economy degrades its security by making it an easy target.

Hey, been reading on this forum about the need for collateral or a contingency plan. Any prospective lenders out there who can check out the link on our project, raising BTC on bitbond.net and we're on the blog as the featured borrower.

https://blog.bitbond.net/2013/11/interview-feature-borrower-funtrench/

We just need 9BTC, could be from a number of lenders. We've been verified by bitbond.net and our company information is with them.

So we're now the featured borrower on Bitbond. Guys feel free to support our business.

https://blog.bitbond.net/2013/11/interview-feature-borrower-funtrench/

The interview shows details of what we're setting up in Kenya with Bitcoin.

Consider some other factors as well:

1. The transaction fees for deposits, trades and withdrawals
2. The policies regarding minimum amounts to withdraw.
3. The available methods for getting cash in and out.

This has been handled elsewhere, but the reasons are basically that Mt.Gox has problems getting dollars out.

You can buy bitcoins at Mt.Gox, VirWox or a bunch of other places. Some may need various verification steps. I'd not say avoid all altcoins. But I agree most are not worth buying.

In a digital world fiat is a dinosaur,
And while Bitcoin may just be four,
There's definitely very much in store,
As dollars fall and Bitcoins soar.

This may or may not be a rant. I'm a writer, so I may not know.

The idea of BTC is like the idea of the internet: Forever stateless, ungoverned and uncontrolled (to some logical extent). Open-source projects are free and open, Redmond and the rest are closed and controlling. So the philosophy behind Bitcoin is essentially to remain open and free of centralized control. The centralized global banking network has shown that it can easily be used to propagate political ends, and we don't want that. We want people to be able to trade and buy stuff even if they live in Tehran or Pyongyang. And that is probably possible at present. However there are some aspects of the nature of Bitcoin that may cause it to be less decentralized in future. I'd like to point out a few and then everyone can poke holes in my propositions.

1. Bitcoin's blockchain

The blockchain is growing. I know this has been discussed widely and the solutions seem to focus on wallets that download less of the blockchain e.g MultiBit, or web wallets like blockchain.info. Now if we look at the philosophy of decentralization, and the appeal of controlling your own money then web wallets break this philosophy. When we use Inputs.io or blockchain.info we get convenience and probably more security than our own computers but we immediately lose the decentralization.

So some people remain faithful to Bitcoin-Qt which downloads the whole blockchain. With the blockchain and the wallet, you have complete control of your money. No one can block it or freeze it and that works well with the philosophy. When the blockchain hits a TB or something it will become impractical to store locally and people will be pushed to use web wallets or paypal-like services e.g. Coinbase. And the blockchain will remain stored in fewer and fewer places as it grows, discriminating against those who don't have the bandwidth or the storage to keep it. And the more people use BTC, the less people will have a complete blockchain, and those who do will become effectively a Bitcoin administration. They will likely include the exchanges and large traders. As Bitcoin matures it may very well become more and more like fiat (not a bad thing, but centralized and controlled). As the difficulty of mining grows, the masses fall off that bandwagon too, leaving a few miners with TH/s type mining power. As we go on, we may have a small club of miners and blockchain keepers.

2. Related to 1. When millions use BTC, the blockchain will be a monstrosity of size, with very few locations able to keep it stored (exchanges and large merchants). Fewer locations reduces the safety in numbers security blanket over the blockchain. Imagine a Stuxnet-type worm eating away most of the blockchains. Similarly, when mining is limited to a few large pools then the guys who run the pools may hold undue power.

3. Mobility. I'm setting up a system of mobile payment via Bitcoin in Kenya. The concept is great and our systems will likely run very well. But we can't call the solution decentralized. Carrying BTC around requires some service that manages your wallet while you use an email address, a phone number or something like that. It works, it's convenient but it breaks the mirage of decentralization. And the more BTC becomes like fiat, the less novel or attractive it is.

4. Buying BTC is HARD!!! For a revolutionary and open technology, I get more complications buying BTC than buying dollars. Proof of residence, ID card and so on - just to buy BTC. And it's harder for guys like me because I can't just connect my bank account to Mt.Gox. They probably don't know what a Kenyan shilling is And from my browsing, people are having problems like this globally. So Bitcoin is supposed to be open and ungoverned, but the reality is that it remains best acquired via donations or face-to-face.

I'm a Bitcoin user, I believe it's revolutionary and amazing. But so is Linux which I use. Think about how hard it has been for Linux to gain the acceptance of the average PC user despite obvious benefits and lack of cost. I think there's enough confidence that Bitcoin can become widely used, but first it has to be easily available. No one should jump through hoops to get bitcoin. So are the success of Bitcoin and its philosophy mutually exclusive?

If I may jump in, I think wide acceptance of Bitcoin for day-to-day transactions in local contexts e.g. in China or India (or even across large parts of Europe or Africa) will lead to a great demand for Bitcoin. Since the currency has a limit of 21 million BTC the logical thing to happen is that the price of 1BTC will skyrocket and people will eventually use satoshis (100 millionths of a bitcoin) for normal trade. So as long as Bitcoin continues to grow in usage among ordinary people for buying things offline in stores and probably even for salaries and bills, the price of a Bitcoin is guaranteed to rise significantly. 300$ will be trivial at such a time.

Right now 0.01 Bitcoin is around 2$. For say 10 satoshis to be that amount to support millions of users, the full Bitcoin would have to be about 20 million US$ 
Of course this can take years or decades to achieve, but even with a case of 1 million users there's only 21 BTC per head maximum, which would force the price to grow exponentially for a while.

Alt-coins provide an easy store of value when speculating for example. Many exchanges allow BTC/LTC currency pairs and while BTC is volatile LTC and FTC seem to hold steady around 2.1 $ and 0.0004BTC respectively. So when BTC is low you buy BTCs in cash and then when it spikes you sell it for LTC. Then you remove the necessity of cash from the trade, which helps given the difficulty of getting fiat currency into the exchange quickly. So it's not BTC that needs alt-coins, it's just that alt-coins make it easier for BTC trading and eventually supply. 

Alt-coins are the only way BTC avoids being an inefficient monopoly. Competition is almost always a good thing. Though maybe it would be good if there were only 3 or 4 alt-coins. I'm thinking maybe just LTC, FTC and Peercoin. More communities working on solving the challenges of cryptocurrency sounds like a good thing, though they are mushrooming too much.

My company (Funtrench Limited) is starting out a bitcoin microfinance in Nairobi, Kenya. Pretty hard to get Bitcoins with local currency and trading on Mt.Gox or the rest of them involves a very circuitous route where almost everywhere no one accepts bank accounts from Africa. We're investing in Bitcoin because with the great success of mobile money in Kenya, and the new tax rules that have raised the transaction fees for M-Pesa, Bitcoin provides the logical next step in rapid, low-cost money transfer. With a network of SMEs as agents, we can provide an easy interface between local currency in East Africa and Bitcoin.

We've done a Kickstarter-like proposal https://www.bitbond.net/buyer/listings (our ID is S3AN134R8) while we work on the software and mobile apps. I think Bitcoin can be bigger in urban Africa than it is in Europe or Asia.