A last mile solution for Bitcoin
2025-06-10 21:39:22 +01:00 by Mark Smith
There are few things that make programmers more happy than seing a complex problem reduced to something simpler, something that makes more sense, dare I say it something elegant.
The first attempt at a problem is usually some sort of abomination. It breaks in places, has weird things sticking out of the sides, other bits stuck on, glue, duck tape, falls apart or freezes when you shake it too much. That's because problems are sometimes very difficult to solve. Some problems are so difficult in fact to solve in the right way that they can take decades to solve, they might involve programmers that span many generations of humans.
So when you see a simplification of a problem down to an understandable set of steps, you notice it. I think that has been the case recently with Bitcoin payments in Africa, and Femi Longe’s neat and very clear use case description on the latest Citadel Dispatch podcast is just wonderful [40:36]:
I was in Kenya a couple of months ago. I spent a week in Kenya. I didn't whip out my card once because one of our guarantees, Tando, had built an application that basically interfaces Bitcoin with the mobile money system MPesa, which means:
- I get in a taxi
- I get to the other end, the end of my ride
- Taxi driver gives me his mobile number
- I go in the Tando app
- I type in his mobile number
- I type in how much I want to send to him
- Instantly Tando generates a lightning invoice
- I go to my lightning app of choice
- I send an instant payment
- Guy gets the payment in Kenyan shillings in his phone INSTANTLY
Right. That's last mile solution.
Literally every merchant in Kenya accepts MPesa. So you don't have to go to the merchants to convince them to accept Bitcoin. Literally you can spend your Bitcoin with every merchant in Kenya. Those are the kinds of technologies that we need to build if we want Bitcoin to reach the kind of scale that it needs to [...] since we founded Tando, we've seen similar applications being built in Costa Rica, in Brazil, in Senegal, in Ghana. All over the world.
Yes it’s still quite a long list of steps. Yes there are probably privacy concerns to giving out your mobile number like that. Yes it’s also maybe not so good to be entirely reliant on the existence of MPesa. But it friggin works, and it works pretty well by the sounds of it. And it’s using open protocols and open source software. It’s truly amazing.
Devs and bitcoin advocates in the west need to figure out how to push adoption of this sort of payment workflow. This is an area I think developing countries could really help western countries, because the people that need this the most in the west are the people that can speak out about it the least. #