{"id":7395,"date":"2016-02-25T01:13:10","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T05:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/?p=7395"},"modified":"2016-02-26T00:32:13","modified_gmt":"2016-02-26T04:32:13","slug":"m-pesa-centralized-digital-currency-and-m-payer-in-obamas-kenya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/m-pesa-centralized-digital-currency-and-m-payer-in-obamas-kenya\/","title":{"rendered":"M-Pesa (centralized digital currency) and M-Payer in Obama&#8217;s Kenya"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mkmBPlwdI7I\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>What does M-Pesa mean?<\/p>\n<p><em>Pesa<\/em> is a Swahili word for money and the <em>M<\/em> is for mobile.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re an American who hasn&#8217;t traveled to the developing world you may not know that cell phone minutes are a huge\u00a0business in most of these countries. \u00a0 Furthermore, the minutes\u00a0are typically much more expensive than the what we&#8217;d ever dream of paying in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>Landlines are usually uncommon and having one installed, if even possible, would be significantly more expensive than just purchasing a cell phone<\/p>\n<p>Phone conversations are usually short, concise and to the point because\u00a0most people cannot afford the minutes.<\/p>\n<p>Back in or around the year 2002 it appears that people in Kenya (and other countries in Africa) started swapping their cell phone minutes among each other as a form of money.<\/p>\n<p>It was also an easy, effective and free method\u00a0of transmitting money to friends and family who lived in other other towns or across the country.<\/p>\n<p>It appears that in or around 2009 this system of using cell phone minutes as a method of transferring money was made official in Kenya by a system called <strong>M-Pesa<\/strong>\u00a0which was launched\u00a0by a Kenyan mobile network operator named Safaricom.<\/p>\n<p>Essentially one uses cash to add a balance to their cell phone service account and can then send any amount of those same funds to anyone by using the\u00a0recipient&#8217;s cell phone number as a payment address.<\/p>\n<p>One can withdraw funds in cash from any of thousands of cell phone minute vendors. These vendors may be located in small shops, gas stations and all sorts of places. \u00a0It&#8217;s not like in the United States where there may only be a few Verizon or AT&amp;T stores in the an entire city.<\/p>\n<p>Since the outset in 2009 it appears that M-Pesa has\u00a0consistently flourished (accepted almost everywhere) and has also spread throughout the African continent (as well as India and Afghanistan)<\/p>\n<p>More recently (I&#8217;m not sure what year), a service in Kenya called <strong>M-Payer<\/strong> (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mpayer.co.ke\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"color: blue;\">http:\/\/www.mpayer.co.ke\/<\/span><\/a>) was created which is specifically used to make it easier and more efficient to use M-Pesa for business.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s difficult\u00a0to believe but it appears that Wikipedia does not have an entry for M-payer \/ Mpayer. \u00a0Although there is an entry for <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/M-Pesa\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"color: blue;\">M-Pesa<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It appears that Kenyans (and others in Africa) may have effectively created a separation of Money and State (much like separation of Church and State in the United States).<\/p>\n<p>Kenyans were displeased with the big banks and the control which the banks had over them.<\/p>\n<p>One might compare M-Pesa to <strong>Bitcoin<\/strong>. \u00a0(And perhaps M-Payer to some sort of software built over it such as a bitcoin wallet.) \u00a0 However, one of the fundamental differences between Bitcoin and M-Pesa is that one is a decentralized while the other is centralized.<\/p>\n<p>If the servers which are running M-Pesa go down, of if the government gets a warrant to shut down the servers, then that would probably be the end of the M-Pesa centralized digital currency.<\/p>\n<p>However, with a <strong>decentralized<\/strong> digital currency like <strong>Bitcoin<\/strong> there&#8217;s no real way to shut it down. \u00a0The Bitcoin protocol and ledger resides on hundreds of thousands (or millions) or computers around the globe.<\/p>\n<p>Please exercise your free speech in the comments section below. There are no stipulations of political correctness on this blog. Speak your mind, give us your thoughts, both objective and subjective. Share your ideas, hunches, inklings or your expertise. Please provide recommendation and corrections if you spot errors in fact within the blog report. Lastly, remember that posting a comment is much like casting a vote, so please do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What does M-Pesa mean? Pesa is a Swahili word for money and the M is for mobile. If you&#8217;re an American who hasn&#8217;t traveled to the developing world you may not know that cell phone minutes are a huge\u00a0business in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/m-pesa-centralized-digital-currency-and-m-payer-in-obamas-kenya\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[91,4,65,12,37,5,988,35],"tags":[3047,3317,2624,4535,4534,4533,4526,4527,4532,4524,4525,4530,4531,4339,851,4536,4529,4528],"class_list":["post-7395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bruce-steadman","category-barrack-obama-eligibility","category-kenya-protectorate","category-lucas-daniel-smith","category-obama-birth-certificate","category-obama-news","category-obama-social-security-number-ssn","category-the-government-vs-lucas-daniel-smith","tag-barack-obama-born-in-kenya-1961","tag-barack-obama-coast-province-general-hospital","tag-barack-obama-kenya-birth-certificate","tag-lucas-d-m-payer-kenya","tag-lucas-d-smith-m-pesa-kenya","tag-lucas-smith-m-pesa-kenya","tag-m-payer","tag-m-payer-kenya","tag-m-payer-lucas-daniel-smith-kenya","tag-m-pesa","tag-m-pesa-kenya","tag-m-pesa-lucas-daniel-smith","tag-m-pesa-lucas-daniel-smith-kenya","tag-obama-birth-certificate","tag-obama-born-in-kenya","tag-obama-fraud-lie","tag-obama-m-payer","tag-obama-m-pesa"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7395"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7403,"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7395\/revisions\/7403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wasobamaborninkenya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}