Section 5 of the South African Reserve bank position paper on virtual currencies (2014!) pretty much sums it up https://www.resbank.co.za/RegulationAndSupervision/NationalPaymentSystem(NPS)/Legal/Documents/Position%20Paper/Virtual%20Currencies%20Position%20Paper%20%20Final_02of2014.pdf

That’s what we thought too, until we road-showed and advertised a few international wallet solutions and pitched a new, simple multi-currency wallet solution. The feedback was lukewarm, at best — and that was to a “middle market” audience.

Our findings were as follows:

Great initiative. I just hope these decisions aren’t just being made based on these “macro views”. i.e. Population age, growth in mobile phone users etc. The continent is so nuanced and what works in Cairo most probably won’t work in Cape Town. For example, a previous reply to this post mentioned Dash, who are spending a lot of money trying to break…

This is a great post and pretty much sums up our views on the subject, bar the fact that I somewhat disagree with the conclusion. There will be a “handful” of payment coins, not just one. Also, this is the first time I realized we’re building a banking as a service platform, lol. Love the terminology.

I’ve just come across this article, nearly 9 months after it was originally written.

Haseeb’s analysis is spot on.

We initially set out to build a killer app (Killer App #3: Payments (macro and micro)) and found out the hard way that the fintech competition is insane and the blockchain…

It’s not regulators per se. They’re okay and generally adapt, provided you aren’t trying to screw the customer. The major issues are threefold; 1 — legacy financial systems with vested interests 2 — ”old cryptos” like bitcoin which aren’t designed for mass market payments and 3 — centralized “speculator friendly” exchanges. If we can solve all three…

A good analysis of the problems with the current “mobile money” solutions. However the solutions presented are fundamentally flawed. Ethereum doesn’t work for payments. IMHO. It gets too expensive when we have to send loads of messages. Also, with mobile everyone seems to assume that there is unlimited bandwidth. Most of the current block chains totally smash your battery and eat data.

Great news for consumers. More choice, lower price. 1–2 days? There really is no reason for it not to be instantaneous.

I think we need to chat ;-)