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A comment on Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from the chaos of Cairo. Parent comment

Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by tazjin on Friday March 19, 2021 @11:57AM (#26514842)
There's still more to this than just having payment infrastructure.

People need to have cards, the cards need to have money on them - both of these are already assumptions that aren't guaranteed to hold for a lot of people.

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Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by Aperocky on Friday March 19, 2021 @01:46PM (#26516241)
Moving to cellphone payments is actually easier than having cards though.
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Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by tazjin on Friday March 19, 2021 @05:00PM (#26518109)
Cell networks are only semi-reliable here, a significant portion of people don't use smart phones (or really care about their phones), and that also needs to be linked to some electronic "value store".

Sure, it's possible to overcome all of these things in theory - but at what benefit to the population? Cashless payments are not a goal in and of themselves.

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Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by subsaharancoder on Friday March 19, 2021 @05:53PM (#26518493)
You don't need a smartphone to enable cellphone financial transactions, check out Kenya's Safaricom Mpesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa which is SIM card based, doesn't use any data, has the option of using USSD or Mobile App. It's already available in Egypt.
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Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by xeromal on Friday March 19, 2021 @09:50PM (#26520050)
You missed his last point though. Cashless payments are not a goal in and of themselves. What benefit do these people gain?
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Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by Aperocky on Saturday March 20, 2021 @09:32PM (#26527421)
It's more safe and more convenient?
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Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by warkdarrior on Friday March 19, 2021 @06:19PM (#26518705)
What do University of South Sudan denars have to do with Kenya?
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Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by subsaharancoder on Friday March 19, 2021 @07:08PM (#26519090)
Can't tell if you're being serious or just trolling, but I'll bite so here you go USSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser...
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Re:Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from th... by tinus_hn on Saturday March 20, 2021 @07:08AM (#26522237)
Surely a newly built government seat dream city will come with mobile phone coverage.
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