Shoutout to the people who did the first ever bitcoin-to-mpesa bridges over a decade ago (Kipochi, Bitpesa, nostr:npub1xv8mzscll8vvy5rsdw7dcqtd2j268a6yupr6gzqh86f2ulhy9kkqmclk3x), but were shut down by Safaricom at the time!
Discussion
I didn’t know this. Where can I find more?
I met Pelle in Nairobi in 2013 or 14. Here's his account about Kipochi: https://blog.stakeventures.com/articles/what-actually-happened-at-kipochi
Bitpesa was shut down by Safaricom in the same year IIRC, but apparently turned into an exchange later: https://www.bitpesa.co/
nostr:npub1xv8mzscll8vvy5rsdw7dcqtd2j268a6yupr6gzqh86f2ulhy9kkqmclk3x and I were traveling around East Africa during that time frame, and he built a Telegram bot in order to pay for his own things with bitcoin and to demo how bridges could work.
damn, did that video pretty much exactly 10 years ago…
Oh wow, I've never seen the second one with the taxi driver. Unfortunately, I don't have a Vimeo account anymore, and somehow it's behind a login wall. Could you re-upload elsewhere perhaps?
hm, try it again it should work without login now.
I wish he would have just accepted the BTC back then.
Works! And it's much quicker and more concise than the other video. 👌
guess I did not think about the tik-tok age attention timespan back then when I did the video. 😉
this is some good memories though, but makes me wonder how far we came?
I might have arrived in a "maybe I should have just chilled at the beach" mode.
At least we don't do zero-conf txs for small payments anymore. That's a massive improvement.
damn, did that video pretty much exactly 10 years ago…