Bitcoin Forum

I am not sure if you are familiar with "Mobile Financial Services" (MFS). But seems in many countries MFS has become most popular. I know it's centralized and shouldn't compare with Bitcoin anyway. As far as I know, a few MFS have been using Blockchain technology to manage their services. And most probably once a day we will discover a worldwide MFS service although it's limited now nationwide. I am just wondering is MFS keeping any roles to prevent Bitcoin growth. I know overall Bitcoin growth is healthy now. But do you believe it would more healthy if there weren't MFS? Although it's centralized but very easy to use everywhere. All the merchants accept it, so you don't need to carry any physical money at all. What do you think?

I don't believe that's the case. What leads to the growth of Bitcoin is a loop between its intrinsic properties and its rise in price. MFS, although they provide a way to adapt FIAT money to new technologies, continue to have many disadvantages. Try sending $ 1M in fiat on a Saturday afternoon from Sydney to Cape Town using MFS or using Bitcoin. Using Bitcoin it can take you about 10 minutes for a ridiculous price. Using MFS can take you two weeks and cost you much more. That is if your bank does not call you to justify why you want to send so much money for money laundering prevention issues and such.

As I said, one reason that attracts people to Bitcoin, especially retail investors, is the rise in price, but what really drives it are its intrinsic properties, and against that the MFS cannot compete.

Institutional investors buy it for its intrinsic properties and retail investors, although at first they may be attracted by the price increase, once they are interested they learn about its intrinsic properties, which are unbeatable by the FIAT, no matter how much it is adapted to new technologies with MFS

Most of the things that we are using right now are connected with our Mobiles. Such financial services are doing nothing but giving us a seperate idea of what can work together with Bitcoins, since bitcoins is not a physical entity but rather a digital one, it's really important for it to get integrated with such services. At the end of the day what else can we expect? Physical bitcoins? I will rather not, it's far too complicated and at the same time, it's also something that would not work, the price keeps changing and it would need extra softwares to keep a track of it, trading is something that goes side by side too. You use various wallets and at the same time, I do think using it on my mobile allows me to see even more news, applications, price, everything that is going in the market.

People are attracted to Bitcoin mostly because its price rises fast. They learn later about the fast it's a coin and how can they benefit from it, from purchases to money transfer.
This being said, I don't think that any financial service has any impact in Bitcoin growth. So imho no, MFS don't slow down Bitcoin growth.

I definitely think that the fact that there are alternative, centralised means to banking is hindering blockchain adoption to an extent.

After all, the mainstream don't particularly care whether or not the thing they are using is decentralised or centralised - that is likely the least of their concerns so to speak. All they care about is convenience, and despite best efforts, the crypto industry's convenience is still lagging behind.

To achieve true mainstream adoption, crypto needs to offer a product that the layman simply cannot refuse from a convenience standpoint.

MFS came before Bitcoin though so I don't think you can say it's preventing anything. What I can say, and as I've pointed out about Bitcoin before, is that it has to be easier to use. MFS (I actually just talk about fintech in general but mobile payments is an excellent example) shows us how mass adoption is actually driven not just by solution for need, but by ease of use:)

we know that. and also the reason more are using MFS even today. in my country, it's used widely in e-commerce for payment methods.

they may purposely don't provide Bitcoin services because BTC is a threat to their services. MFS are often a business by big banks and preventing the spread of information of BTC will make them prolong their relevance.  but i guess sooner they will be open for cryptocurrency too especially these days because they now understand that Bitcoin is here to stay.

The true answer lies in the term itself. Mobile.

I've talked about my experiences before in Africa where the majority of people in urban settings and even increasingly in rural environments were just beginning to get access to mobile phones. $5 gets you a mobile phone.

So in a world where bank cards and other internet-based services still can't crack the market, MFS wins the day.

What's "preventing" growth of Bitcoin is access in this regard. You still need a very low-end smartphone and internet for retail access to Bitcoin. That may come one day but when the majority of the world (we're talking a billion people at least) don't yet have that minimum requirement BUT could have regular mobiles, MFS will still win the day. For now.

Isnt it the same for both though? MFS needs mobile phone and internet , thats pretty much the same with crypto nowadays because you can secure your crypto in a mobile wallet apps such as Trust Wallet, Safepal Wallet etc.

In general its almost the same but I think the main differences would be the amount that needs to be sent. Its easier for the old folks to send $10 using MFS rather than 0.00021 btc with a crypto wallet. Aside from this, $10 is still a $10 a month from now but 0.00021 btc could be lower or higher than $10 in a month

No. I've seen MFS in Africa as early as 2014, and I know Mpesa for example was there even before 2010, much earlier than Bitcoin. It works only with SMS. This means you don't need a smartphone. GSM phones only so we're talking about even those $2 China phones you could buy or swap free sims within a family. Not internet capable and not using data the way smartphones do. Negligible barrier to entry.

You send and receive money, free, instantly, even fractions of a penny is possible, only with an SMS to a number. No internet needed, everyone was using cheap phones to buy stuff from their local stall or send each other payments owed, even to split a cheap meal among a group.

I don't think so, they are more likely to promote growth since there's profit when it comes to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, plus they know that if they cater for more ways to pay and do transactions, their profit will only grow so I don't think it prevents the growth, plus with them handling the heavy stuff, MFS can be helpful to those that aren't familiar with crypto so they can join in.

Damn, I didnt know this kind of MFS exist. I thought that all MFS comes with an app that uses internet to connect to but yeah its 2021 and I guess atleast half of African probably have a smartphone right now though


This is exactly the reason why people probably wont even start to consider using bitcoin / crypto because the functionality is pretty much similar. People wont even bother to know more in depth about bitcoin because all they know is that as long as it can be used to send and receive money then its similar to cash while in fact it is not

I don't think that new payment methods are stopping Bitcoin adoption, because even older methods are superior to Bitcoin. The main reason why people don't adopt Bitcoin for daily transactions is that it's hard to find a place where it is accepted. With a debit or credit card you can go to any shop or any supermarket, you can pay online and even in other countries, but with Bitcoin you will most of the time just not be able to pay with it. The second reason is volatility - most people are not comfortable holding something that can lose 50-80% of its value, even if on average it gains a lot of value. Also Bitcoin has a strong reputation of having enormous fees, even though it's rarely true, the public perception has already been formed.

Yours is the only example I've read in this thread thus far of what MFS is all about--and I really don't understand what it is and have never heard the term used before.

OP, I'm interested in this discussion but what exactly are mobile financial services?  I'm assuming they're kind of like what PayPal is, a service that allows users to send money to other people through their smartphones....?  I don't know if it's because I'm in the US that I haven't heard of this, but can you or anyone else give examples of companies that provide these kinds of services?

Assuming I'm right in my guess at what MFS is, then no, I don't think bitcoin is being affected in any way by them.  Bitcoin could serve as an easy way to send funds across the world for a small fee, but the reality is that most people don't use it for that purpose--just like they don't use bitcoin to buy things (for the most part, anyway).  Bitcoin has remained popular, and has grown in value over the years, for the one thing it's really good at: being a speculative instrument for trading and also as a means to store value.

There are thousands of alternative coins (altcoins) being created daily and they all run on the blockchain, more of these are created daily. Bitcoin does not need monopoly to grow in adoption.
There are so many other payment options out there, but none has the unique qualities if Bitcoin.

Such people who do not bother to look beyond the features of sending and receiving funds probably do not need to use it.

There are many fintech that offer mobile payments of one way or another and that has been around for quite a while. It could potentially hurt crypto currencies that are linked to mobile or ubiquitous payment systems, but I do not think that these projects have failed or are irrelevant due to this type of competence, but rather due to an insufficient drive for adoption. I am certain that these are not comparable with bitcoin, mostly used for value store and protection against inflation.

Same in my country. I mean obviously nobody calls it MFS but everyone calls it mobile payments. And it's been around long before we could scan QR codes and even long before crypto. It's easy when all you need is a phone number to send or receive payments plus no complicated thinking. Your prepaid balance is your bank account, and it's all easy to see in one place.

Mobile financial services are, IMO, not prohibiting bitcoin growth in any way. They are combatting centralized bank services if anything, and not directly competing with bitcoin at all. People are interested with the convenience and the ease of use of these services, hence why there is a growing use for mobile financial services.

People come to crypto and bitcoin simply because they want to profit off of it, and are interested mainly on the speculative side of things for bitcoin and not really for its utility as a payment method. These are two different things.

I don't necessarily think so.

If you look at a lot of the so called MFS's and the big players in the scene (e.g., Paypal, Revolut, eToro) they all now offer crypto integration one way or another. Even if they don't, they tend to be the inspiration for crypto related apps on a design and functionality perspective.

I think that MFS's could provide an alternative means of accessing crypto that is more convenient and familiar to the general population. Granted, there are issues with the custodial/centralised models that they operate, but I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing overall that they are competing/integrating with crypto.

In my opinion, I think somewhere in this article there will be thoughts like my opinion that MFS cannot stop the growth of BTC, the transfer of MFS money from one region to another it will take a lot of time this is a huge drawback of MFS. while compared to BTC it only takes about 10-15 minutes compared to MFS.

I would say this is the discussion same as comparing the fiat usage vs crypto usage. MFS, yes it's also used in developing countries these days and getting popular mode of payment. I have seen low living villagers and farmers who does not even seem to have a formal education are also using the MFS. The google specifically has made it way easier fr the Indian's by providing easy scan and pay services!
Company like Paytm has gone way ahead this and also provided live speaker facility which read outs the payment loud if someone pays it. So peeps don't even need to rely on the transaction history to check this out. It does not matter if the person is literate or illiterate.

Now, coming back to the Bitcoin and relation to above scenario, its literally null. Bitcoin adoption is yet to become reality. The adoption which I am thinking here is, peeps carrying the BTC wallet with them and paying like the MFS. It's not acceptable because it not known by every person on the globe.

It's not because current MFS are restricting it, it's actually because BTC's just different chapter in the financial system and it needs time for proper infra set up. BTC's currently tangled up in the matrix of ban and unban, legality stuff and what not.

So it's not the MFS really but the later factors which are preventing it from "rapid growth".