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Comment by zinekeller

Eh, probably, but so can mobile banking solutions[1] that are popular in Africa. Unlike in, for example, Europe where mobile payments requires a (relatively fancy) phone, M-Pesa works even on basic phones, which you can't say about cryptocurrencies in general. This is not to dismiss them, of course, but "conventional" currency already has a solution for this, so unless you're advocating for decentralisation (which is a different issue altogether), I don't think that cryptocurrency can serve the unbanked without radical changes that will also benefit conventional banking.

P.S. If you instead measure unbanked/underbanked by percentages (and exclude mobile banks like M-Pesa), you can see Japan and Korea on top 25[2], which isn't to say that they're poor (which also includes China which was mentioned in the article), but because of cultural differences. If you include the likes of M-Pesa, the graph slides slightly so that it shows that Asians (in general) tend to be the underbanked, which is technically true but doesn't automatically mean that they're poor.

[1] For example, M-Pesa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa)

[2] Last data I read about this is on 2017, so this might have changed? But my point still stands out.

parent zinekeller 5 years ago

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