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This is a pretty big deal for our Mexican community on Hive I think:
Spanish translation of this post here thanks to @alteramelia.
What this means for those of you on Hive is that you can now publish blog posts, comment and upload videos to Hive and then pay your Internet and telephone bill directly with the Hive or HBD you get paid out!
“Over four million Mexicans can now pay with bitcoin for their cable, internet, and phone service,” IBEX’s CEO Jose Lemus said on stage as he announced the partnership. “With this partnership, we’re opening the doors to every bitcoin and Lightning company and financial tech company that wants to leverage Lightning technology … [we will be] rolling out new technology with Grupo Salinas that will enable mexicans to pay their groceries with bitcoin, electronics and to receive remittances.” Lemus explained his excitement about the announcement, saying that this is the “tip of the iceberg of what will go on in Mexico.”
As I've said all along, the @v4vapp Hive Lightning Bridge is Hive's Trojan horse into the real world of commerce. There are deals being done to allow BTC Lightning payments and these are very real. We in Hive would have no chance of getting a major telco to accept our lowly ranked coin, but because Hive is fast and fee-less and Lightning is kinda fast and mostly fee-less, running a bridge between them is possible.
Today it's a big telco group but once this stuff starts to be normalized in the country, and noting that it cuts a large percentage out of the costs especially compared to credit cards, I think we'll see wider adoption.
I've also said all along that this stuff won't take off in the USA or Europe, it will be central/south America and Africa where these deals start to happen.
If you are able to pay your phone bill with Lightning and you have some Hive, all you need to do is use the v4v.app website. It works well on desktop or even in the in-app browser in Hive Keychain app.
I would love someone to translate my post and share it widely to Mexican groups on Hive. Big upvotes for anyone who does that!
Dev work
Dev work continues and I'm a couple of posts behind on explaining. I'll hopefully get those posts written up soon.
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