[Cryptography] digital currency is currency - Ecuador

[ianG]

On 30/08/2014 03:02 am, dan at geer.org wrote:
> 
> [possibly OT except for the question "What is a digital currency?"]


Sigh, yes.  A term with even less precision than MITM ;)  In the 1990s
we called it eCash (which was a trademark) or digital cash.  These days
the Bitcoiners seem to have coalesced around the term cryptocurrency
which I understand to be the same thing, although Bitcoiners as a
community mostly only understand the blockchain family.

What Ecuador is doing is more properly called mobile money.  It is an
application inserted into the phones[0] by the telco.  It does simple
requests to the telco to do transfers.  The business was pioneered by
Safaricom with mPesa, so whatever you know about that will likely happen
with Ecuador.

Every developing country should have mobile money, that they don't is a
crime against humanity.

The reason for the criticism is threefold:  Banks will kill this project
if they can because it puts money in controlling hands of another, a
telco.  2, the USA will be extremely nervous of any attempt to move away
from the dollar, as its dollar reserve status is something they fight
hard to keep[1].  And 3, the normal latino incapability to put a project
into the field, in that the Ecuadoreans have been talking about projects
like this for at least a decade to my knowledge.


> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_ECUADOR_DIGITAL_MONEY

link seems gone.

iang



[0] so works on dumb/feature phones as well which is important for
unbanked market
[1] not that you'd know it from their foreign policy.