To add to this point, M-Pesa has been a huge success in Kenya, but has had trouble expanding to other countries because of some inherent limitations of M-Pesa's model.

A cryptocurrency could enable the next evolution of mobile payment services like M-Pesa. I touched on this in a past blog post:

https://medium.com/@petershin45/hate-bitcoin-this-might-chan... (You can scroll down to the section titled "How Bitcoin can help the poor and unbanked")