Hi Kenyan bitcoiners.

We're launching a wallet with mpesa to bitcoin integration. We performed the first M-Pesa to Bitcoin sale 2 weeks ago.

Our site is http://kipochi.com and yes we have a version in Kiswahili http://kipochi.com/sw/

I'd be interested in hearing feedback and perhaps organizing a meetup here in Nairobi.

Asante sana

Pelle

Instead of discussing who should be on this list, I think it's much more pertinent to discuss if we need that list.

I think it is a grave error to list representatives there. Regardless of the disclaimer, these are going to be considered representatives.

Lets just leave the politics out of bitcoin.org and remove it. I have created a pull request here, which I hope will put the whole issue to rest:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/152

This is nothing against anyone on or off the list. It's just that this is a bad move and is bad for the community and the project as a whole.

There is another problem.

The App uses 2 external JS for google analytics and mixpanel. While these are both trustworthy companies, basically a bad actor there could monitor passwords and private keys.

I'd recommend that any browser wallet not include any externally controlled javascripts.

P

Of course bitcoin is the most anti-fragile currency out there.

That said it would be even less fragile and in the general interest of Bitcoin users if there were at least a couple of alternatives around.

Ideally they would not be straight clones of BTC and have different properties and algorithms. For example just the fact that LTC uses SCRYPT over SHA256 makes it different enough to make the ecosystem less fragile as a whole.

Some of these may be more widespread in use in certain geographical areas or verticals just like in the world of social networks.

Any exchange in an OECD country should be enforcing KYC by now or they are probably breaking pre existing laws. Some regulators are slow to put out specific rules and could attack existing exchanges for breaking the law once they discover bitcoin and have made up their mind about it.

Now FinCEN has thought about it, the other OECD countries are not far behind issuing "guidances".

I read somewhere that BitPay think's there is an exception for them as they are a payment processor. Since they do exchange I think that is wishful thinking. Mind you it won't be hard for them to implement, though they may have to restrict the countries they support.

Having been part of Financial Crypto 1.0 back in the 90's I know that most American's (in particular us libertarians) think non US jurisdictions magically don't care about KYC. Unfortunately most mid economy countries and offshore jurisdictions have been successfully bullied by the OECD FATF since the 90s to implement considerably stricter KYC rules than we have here.

I've heard people think you can just go open a bitcoin exchange in Panama or the Cayman Islands to solve the problem. The financial services commission in the respective jurisdiction would first of all not give you a license unless you implement ridiculous KYC as they don't want to risk their banking connections to the US. Panama was cut off from the SWIFT network for half a year back in the 90's for just this reason.

Sorry for the rant.

Anyway I've posted my analysis of the FinCEN guidelines here that I think provide a pretty good background.

http://payglo.be/2013/03/22/what-the-fincen-bitcoin-guidelines-actually-say/

I agree 100% with you here. However US (Persons) performing bitcoin businesses interacting with the US banking system are at a very high risk and will unfortunately need to comply or eventually face jail time.

I see there as being 2 classes of bitcoin merchant processors/wallets/exchanges:

• High KYC countries - eg US and EU
• No KYC countries - where governments can't enforce KYC requirements

What is great about bitcoin is that the US can't stop people using Bitcoin in Nigeria like they can in the regular banking system. But they can stop any company dealing with the US banking system of dealing directly with Nigerian clients.

Hi,
I'm @PelleB on twitter and write on both http://stakeventures.com and http://payglo.be about Bitcoin and payments.

I'd appreciate a whitelist so I can join in the discussion.

Pelle

I've been writing about BitCoin for a while on http://payglo.be and http://stakeventures.com.

Was involved with the first batch of crypto currencies in the late 90's.