Bitcoin Forum

The next Bitcoin Kenya meetup is Friday, March 7th - 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm.

Pete's Cafe and Burrito Haven
Ground Floor, Bishop Magua House, Ngong Rd., Nairobi
(Ground level of the building where iHub is located).

Special guest: Tomer Kantor (iamsatoshi), who will be filming the meetup, so don't be late.

Bitcoin startups in Kenya include:

Kipochi
BitPesa
CoinFling
TagPesa

and a number of merchants and charitable organizations now accept Bitcoin payments / donations:
Give Directly
The Water Project
TunaPanda
Wageni Technologies

Kenya presents a unique opportunity for Bitcoin in that well over half the population is already comfortable storing value "on their phones" and using that value to transfer amounts small and large to peers, or for use in bill payment or even retail purchases.    Kenya is one of the few place where a measurable percent of the country's GDP passes through the mobile payments network -- and Kenya leads all other areas with about a third of the GDP's value traversing the M-PESA and Airtel mobile payment networks.   Though M-PESA serves the market relatively well today, its users continue to suffer from the payment network's availability and performance issues and the network's operator faces renewed regulatory and other external pressures such that a gap for Bitcoin to fill exists now.

Here's an example -- Airtel mobile money woes.
e.g., http://www.techtrends.co.zm/mobile/airtel-money-instant

The next Bitcoin meetup in Nairobi occurs Friday, August 08, 2014 at 4pm.

This is at Pete's Cafe and Burrito Haven (at Bishop Magua House building, which is the building where iHub, USHAIDI, http://Brck.net, etc. are all located).

4pm - 6pm.

Among the discussions will be Ken Griffith from Dinero, Ltd will speaking on Bitcoin SACCOs.

- http://www.meetup.com/Kenya-Bitcoin/events/197924672/

Thanks for setting this up whoever you are!BTC

Does the Meet Up venue accept Bitcoin?

Neither Pete's Coffee nor Brew Bistro (the two host locations, to-date, for the monthly meetup) accept Bitcoin yet.  They are both located in office buildings with startup incubators (Pete's Coffee is in the building that hosts iHub as well as USHAIDI, Brck, GSMA, & others, and Brew Bistro is in the building that 88MPH sits) so there are plenty of techies, many of whom would pay with Bitcoin.

Perhaps once BitSoko starts rolling there will be more merchants in Kenya willing to put up the "Bitcoin Accepted here" sign.

Meetup today (Monday, December 1st, 2014, 5pm) at iHub (Bishop Magua Centre on Ngong Road) Nairobi

 - http://www.meetup.com/Kenya-Bitcoin/events/218657905