I joined a conversation about cash usage on X, with some defending its role in providing freedom and privacy, and others calling it obsolete. What often gets missed, especially from a Western perspective, is how 80-90% of transactions in places like Africa are still cash-based, mostly for small, frequent payments. The real issue isn’t just scalability (like LN), it’s how to onboard the 1.4 billion unbanked into Bitcoin before CBDCs replace cash.

I proposed a Sats2Cash model as a bridge, using human ATMs to handle instant Bitcoin-to-cash bill payments without needing to create offers or meet in person. Someone suggested Vexl, which is solid for privacy-focused P2P trades, but it still requires creating offers and in-person meetings, which makes it hard (if not impossible) to scale quickly enough to achieve mass adoption before CBDCs take over.

For context, at Paxful in 2021, we handled 391k P2P cash trades with £64m in volume, and the average trade size was ~$163. Cash was the fastest-growing payment group in terms of number of trades, but this average trade size is still much larger than the small, everyday cash payments that dominate regions like Africa. Vexl, despite their privacy, will likely face similar issues due to larger trade sizes and slower onboarding.

Additionally, because Vexl is free, it will limit network growth, as there are no financial incentives for users to expand it. By contrast, Sats2Cash incentives intermediaries (human ATMs) with tips, especially in regions like Nigeria, where users traditionally pay a premium to buy Bitcoin.

This is why targeting smaller, frequent payments and creating fast onboarding is crucial. P2P marketplaces like Vexl and Paxful can’t scale fast enough, and without reaching mass adoption before CBDCs, it may be too late for Bitcoin to be adopted for everyday use.

Read more on this approach here: https://medium.com/@stephenkassi/bitcoins-role-in-cash-heavy-economies-revolutionising-financial-inclusion-for-the-unbanked-6e5cffbc4dc4

I hope someone finds it useful.

#Bitcoin #FinancialInclusion #Unbanked #Micropayments #CashIsKing #Cash #CashPayments #Fiat #Sats2Cash #LN #Africa

Nowadays aren’t communities without utility just conversation?

Hey, are there plans to improve the search so not just predominantly hashtag based?

Great improvement

This is a battle between top-down governance and bottom-up innovation

Lol

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Ephemeral identities address many of the concerns laid out in this article.

Thanks for sharing the video.

One of the potential ways of making relays more understandable would be creating them for every state down to local political level. Imagine the ability to vote on issues, fundraise for local causes and well, just fostering greater community engagement.

This is true. NIP05 is a step in the right direction but I think DIDs would be better for adoption. Tbh unless you have some form of verification badge for everyone even things like hashing profile images and text analysis of names and bios etc would do more to stop impersonation. Look at how rampant this is on Twitter and how the scammers use it

Thanks for sharing 🍀

We need multiple sources of authentication that can be verified in real-time

Promising avg. trade size

Typo sorry, “work offline with any phone”…

Ok read the git. If you built P2P payments with escrow that didn’t need lightning that would more powerful as it would be fully decentralised. I’d worked on a P2P telegram bot before but felt USSD offered a better experience as you could dial the numbers on behalf of the customer thus making it look like an app plus it would work online on any phone. But then certain telcos started charging per transaction vs session…

Does this have an order book? Can you dm me a one-pager on the features pls #[2]​?

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What was the biggest takeaway #[2]​?