In countries where checks, credit cards and bank accounts are rare, the device you use for mere phone calls becomes a handy bank. Airtime minutes are currency.
That’s just a hack of the prepaid cellphone system. When companies start to take this market seriously, interesting things happen.
UCI professor Bill Maurer and Scott Mainwaring of Intel’s People and Practices Research Group recently ran a conference studying this topic.
With Bill and Scott, let’s discuss:
- What does “digital money” cover? How do alternative currencies fit?
- Which efforts or countries have been successful? failures? why?
- What is the design frontier for digital money? the most promising projects?
- How might digital money evolve from here?
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