Literally saving lifes with Crypto!
Dear Steemians,
My dear friend @williambanks surprised me today with this announcement that at @imaxess in Tijuana, where we placed one of our Bitcoin42 ATM's they will be accepting Steem Dollars as payment! WOW!
This comes quite as surprise for me, but on the other hand not too much. I have constantly been pushing the boundaries of the cryptoworld and been innovating and promoting on tech which is as I have been told, is too early for it's time. Well... the normal early adopters burden.
We have moved our ATM's there with the understanding that they would integrate Bitcoin as a payment system into their accounting software, but until today, there always have been some technical difficulties which halted this trajection. A lot of sweat, pain and money has been invested into this mission, and I was almost not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but with this announcement the future looks bright again!
(This is an old screenshot of the ATM's Interface)
I really feel responsible for this, since I had long conversations and arguments with @williambanks about the viability of the tech behind Steemit, and Bitshares at large. But these stories will be told another time.
So how the heck will we be saving lifes with crypto? Well easy... Sometimes Money get's in the way when it comes to helping people in difficult life situations, and with the speed of a Steemdollar transaction things will be settled fast enough to make blocked credit cards, other stupid reasons or even the high cost of entry level into banking of the un bankend a reality.
This is me being interviewed by the BitcoinMediaProject. I was ridiculously tired that day, since we worked literally 20h days to make it happen.
We at Bitcoin42 have always been about bringing crypto into the real world while having ethical & social practices hardwired into everything we do.
It's a beautiful day outside today. So I will leave this post for what it is, and will keep you updated with more another time.
Best,
Alec Hahn
Alec, so good to see you here. :)
Hi! Cool, you too! :) Will try to be a bit more active. Have Steemit on my radar since day one. ;) Will follow you from now on too! :)
Awesome.. I've been pretty quiet lately, but I'm going to be more active. I've definitely followed you as well. Are you aware of / thinking of going to the first annual Steem Fest in Amsterdam? I will try to make it, but not sure yet.
cool and very illuminating
Interesting and exciting lets just hope all this pans out and we can make better money then at our jobs.
I don't think hope is needed. (Hope is the last resort, and only useful when out of control). We are in full control of the situation and this is going to happen. :) (Except death crosses our way, so hope that we all stay alive and well.). ;)
@alechahn I don't think you said, what you think you said there.
Note to everyone, have patience with my friend Alec. He's a German living in Mexico and while he speaks English really, really well sometimes he says the weirdest things.
Usually it's some German thing that didn't come across in the translation or something someone said in English that got a strange interpretation when stored in his ginormous brain.
I think what he's saying is "the light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train" ;)
Lol... Yes... Wer Licht am Ende des Tunnels sieht ist optimistisch. Who sees light at the End of the Tunnel is optimistic. No trains of death ahead. :D
Congratulations to you and to Mexico, too!
One should think that germany is mostly first, but ....
it isn't able to place any BTC ATM in the whole county! GRRR. Here read why:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@freiheit50/why-there-are-no-bitcoin-atm-s-in-germany
Yes... It's rediculous. I would love to setup Bitcoin ATMs in Germany... But well... The world is big enough and the time will come. :)
Are you german? I just noticed your Berliner Wall story, where I found no reply button.
Born and raised in Germany by a English mother and German father. The words fatherland, motherland and homeland have a very real meaning for me. ;)
To elaborate on these technical difficulties. My spanish isn't that good. I built the system but then had to go away for awhile during integration. During that time, one of the APIs we relied on changed drastically and I've only recently been given the greenlight to fix it. Either way It was a blocking issue and it slowed integration to a halt.
This is what I'm resolving right now today. We have an alternative API thank you #blocktrades and can reintegrate both steem and bitcoin so the process will be smoother and this time I'm not going anywhere until this is stood up and functional.
Sorry about dropping the ball on you like that @alechahn I own it and I'm fixing it. We should talk about the integration of SBD with your ATMs soon too. Might be fun to have the first ATM in the world that does steem as well.
No worries. It not been all on you. Other factors have also been part of the delays which added up. Exciting times ahead of us.
It's really interesting that the receptiveness other cultures have toward crypto. In Canada many people are so cynical about BTC, even when I present them the FACTS. "It's not worth anything!" they say...ugh...have you ever made a trade? Garage sale? We've all had those types of convos I'm sure.
It shows who really knows what money is. "Money" is something that solves problems. Money is what makes trading always possible. It's not paper. It's not permission from banks or governments.
Maybe a lot of folks in "the first world" have it too cushy to care to understand.
So many ppl go down to Mexico for the lower cost of medical and dental. That is such a perfect place to show the value of crypto to cynical North Americans. This is really cool news to see steem and crypto in general moving upwords, providing more and more value; life-changing value.
All the best to your current/future project(s) in this direction @williambanks and @alechahn
I follow you for such a nice comment. :)
People in second and third world countries, especially where the grey market is big, are ripe for adoption of cryptocurrency POS systems, especially ones that help both buyers and sellers not be surveiled in their transactions. Steem is not ideal in this respect, however, this is something that I personally will be working on fixing, but really, other cryptos especially ones like zcash, will fill this gap. People who have lived through dictatorships and other kinds of totalitarian governments understand that giving the government access to private data is a tippie toe step towards serious situations involving people dying.
This! Forget exciting abstract concepts like dictatorships for a bit, I could argue you are living under one right now, but I'll not go down that road. ;) :P
Let me give you a real life example. We have been working with an non profit called "Cafe Migrante" who we trained to use crypto because fair trade coffee producers got bullied and extorted by neighboring coffee farmers who didn't get the fair trade deal. ( Remember the hypocrisy of the fair trade logo is that only 20% of the coffee needs to be fair trade to get the certified logo). So how did the neighbor know they got much more for their coffee? Well... This are small communities with big family's, so some cousin works at the bank and has access to look into the bank account... The rest is up to your imagination...
All governments are like dictatorships, and in fact, can be a lot more insidious because the image of egalitarianism presented. Economic oppression kills in different ways, it raises suicide rates, domestic violence, inhibits potential and can kill indirectly through wrong headed health policies created by special interest regulatory capture. And I have neglected also the use of divide and conquer to bring violence without directly implicating legislators and their cronies, think of George Soros, a modern example of a war profiteering who cloaks his actions in philanthropy, in a long tradition of such mischief.
Blockpay, a project that is also a baby of one of the founders of Steem, is slowly moving forward as well, and integration with hardware to allow also contactless debit card payments into one package is something that will help a lot, since already it's cumbersome on a sales counter to have more than one POS machine. But it will advance, and there are banks who are receptive to widening the possibilities for traders to accept more kinds of payments than just bank and credit cards, indeed there is a consortium of banks working on a blockchain based payment clearing house system for interbank transfers, it will be up and running within the next year.