Why do you need crypto/blockchain?

As you may know, in a few weeks we are launching a pilot for the unbanked community in Peru together with impactMarket, Celo Foundation and local NGOs. The goal is to provide underprivileged individuals with an unconditional basic income (#UBI), and give them tools and solutions to transact digitally within their community and with the rest of the world.

To do this, we plan to distribute @ammercards and equip local merchants with Ammer Pay on the physical PoS devices. Now for the fun part.

For the past three days, my team has been trying to find a solution to pay for the PoS devices on the local (Peruvian) “Amazon” with a European credit card. And we've tried everything. Private and corporate cards, debit and credit, issued by Swiss, German, Belgian and Spanish banks. Not a chance. And it's not even a huge sum (less than $1,000).

For me, this is the ultimate use case for crypto. We live in a world where consumers want to buy globally and merchants want to sell globally. And the traditional financial system, which is heavily localized / siloed simply does not meet that need.

The internet makes information available to anyone from anywhere. And crypto does the same for the transfer of value. Period.

P.S. It looks like we will be able to solve this problem by relying on an old friend from Peru who will be able to buy the PoS with his local credit card and deliver them in person. Still crazy that with all this technology available, and given that most money is digital and just information anyway, we have to go back to human networks instead of using a machine ones.