The largest payment platform on Earth can reach 2 billion people | Hacker News Reader

The largest payment platform on Earth can reach 2 billion people

qz.com

32 pointsdsr1225 comments

I must have missed the explanation on the chart showing Mobile Penetration by country. Can someone explain how a country like Vietnam has 173% penetration? Does a penetration greater than 100% mean many people have two cell phones?

I've heard (but can't find a link ATM) that it's not uncommon for people in developing countries have multiple phones or multiple SIM cards and will call on one or the other depending on that provider's current rates.

Not only that, but I know also many freelancers that have one personal phone/sim and one business phone/sim.

In Vietnam, and in many countries in the developing world, mobile phone users have multiple sim cards to take advantage of competitive rates and to call friends/family on network. Calls to mobiles using the same operator are often significantly cheaper. Many phones (smartphones included) released in the developing world even have multi-sim card ports.

One person can have 2-3 phones with different SIM's.

Is it the largest payment platform in the world or the largest advertising platform in the world that just happens to do payments?

This actually stemmed from an idea Nathan Eagle had a few years ago trying to Mechanical Turk the developing world. The idea being to send micro-tasks (often translation) to people via SMS, then paying them upon successful completion.

That never took off with much traction that I know of, primarily because it was hard to find micro-tasks that were worth the money.

There is this very weird legal distinction in Africa between airtime and actual money. Mobile money systems like mPesa are more and more prevalent, but if you stop and think for a minute everybody has been loading their phones with 'cash' for time eternal. (and been able to transfer it about)

It is only the addition of being able to remove the money from the network as cash that makes mobile money different. But as pointed in the FA, people spend so much money on airtime that for small values of x mobile money and airtime are equivalent.

In any case, smart move by Nathan, it is much easier making deals with carriers to buy large swaths of their airtime than integrate with their totally varied mobile money systems.

I think what nicpottier writes above is the insight to take away from JANA, basically communications budget is a fungible commodity for a lot of people. They really want their communication, there is a way to 'barter' communication credits for work. This works really well because there are more than enough ways to 'spend' mobile credits. Given a currency 'mobile minutes' an exchange rate to the local currency, and a market maker (the telcos) to enable both the currency exchange and the ability to transact and its a pretty cool opportunity.

I just want to point out that yes, there is a big difference between airtime and actual money. When I buy credit for my pre-paid card, if I want 5 euros credit, I will pay 5 euros + VAT. But because people pay in our local currency, most of them don't notice. So 5 euros credit it's a product and you have to pay VAT. 5 euros deposited in a bank are actual money and you don't have to pay VAT. Of course, this only happens because of legislation.

The worlds largest payment platform has reached way more than 2 billion.. It's called the U.S. Dollar. I've never been in a Country where it has not been accepted.

I'm an American that travels extensively, as well as lives abroad.

The only places outside the US that accept US dollars are places located near the US border, or heavily trafficked tourist areas.

Lots of people in Latin America prefer to work with dollars when they can. Look at what the government of Argentina has been up to recently in terms of limiting the population's access to US dollars if you don't believe this.

People in high-inflation places can benefit from holding dollars instead of their local currency - and one easy way to get ahold of them is just to accept them as payment for goods or services.

Agreed, I was just in Costa Rica and most businesses I encountered accepted USD. I also think its ease of conversion with the local currency helped as no calculating was really necessary.

Try paying with a US dollar anywhere in western europe. I'm pretty sure you'll end up with a weird look, unless perhaps you're massively overpaying.

You may be thinking myopically if you are just thinking of mom, and pop fish n chips store. Because, how do western European oil companies.. buy oil(which can only be bought and sold in US dollars)? How do western European electronic companies get parts from Taiwan, and Japan without outrageous exchange fees. Do you think these companies switch back and forth from euros to us dollars.. or do you think western European companies(especially manufacturing) just keep, and use US dollars. The entire world economy depends on the US currency platform.

What? I'm pretty sure nobody (very few places?) in Europe accept USD.

Then you haven't travelled to a lot of countries.

That aren't too many places that accept the US dollar directly outside of the America's. In most places in Europe and Asia you'll be hard pressed to pay with the US Dollar. In major tourist cities, maybe ... but outside of that (and even inside) you're best bet for paying will be to go to a currency exchange and trade.

15+ countries so far and none accept the US Dollar directly.

It's illegal in Brazil to accept payment in US Dollars... or in any foreign curerncy, for that matter.

Just because it's illegal. Doesn't mean it's not accepted.

You haven't been to many countries then. I don't think any country I've been to except the US accepts US currency. They'll accept it in a bureau de change, but you can say that of lots of currencies.

(For reference, that's mainly Australasia and Europe)

An on-topic but not well-known fact: "The present currency of Ecuador is the United States dollar."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_of_Ecuador

The US dollar is not the platform that helps you to pay something.

It is the thing that you pay, with or without using the help of a platform to do so.

Can you really not understand the difference?

So a currency isn't a platform by which we store, and exchange value. Interesting.

Here, Platform != "store of value", Platform == "transaction processing system"

Are you trolling me?

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