Global Trade [Formerly: Tradehill Bitcoin exchange shut down for 2nd time in 2 years]

"...the work we're doing here and how it can impact trade throughout the
globe."

The Bitcoin projects that I am aware of in South Florida--as
Co-Organizer of Miami International Bitcoin, one of the largest Bitcoin
Meetup groups in the USA--are associated with international trade.  Our
strengths--as individuals in a region supported by logistics, tourism,
and international financial services--lie in moving large amounts of
freight, individuals, and money efficiently.

We have no great engineering schools, and when Phil Zimmerman graduated
with his undergraduate degree down here, he left the area.  However, we
have the world's TWO busiest cruise ports, two major transshipment hubs,
a huge financial district, and Florida's second-largest tourist
destination (South Beach); and seemingly *everyone* in the Western
Hemisphere changes planes in Miami or Fort Lauderdale.

The Bitcoin projects that my students and I are working on are all
associated with enabling the half-billion to the south of us, who do not
have access to credit and capital markets, to access markets to the
north of us.  Most of the projects down here are relatively small-scale
still, but the number of them is growing.

In Latin America, the Argentines are all over Bitcoin, and their user
group has several hundred members.  A Bitcoin evangelist whom I know has
an office in the same complex as Startup Chile.  We are hearing a lot
about interest in Colombia.  I recently had a meeting to introduce the
head of the Hispanic Business Iniative Fund at his office in the Miami
Free Zone (We have a Free Trade Zone, too.), and he was very
enthusiastic.  I also met with a representative of micro-lending
organization Accion, who bought $1 worth of bitcoin from me there in her
office.  This week, I am delivering a guest lecture at the University of
Miami on Bitcoin.  I gather from my real estate contacts that some
Brazilians are looking at Bitcoin as a medium for investments in
commercial buildings in South Florida.

I also am working with a Bitcoin advocate in Ghana to use Bitcoin as a
medium for funding entrepreneurs there, and my friend Pelle Braendgaard
is in Nairobi working on Kipochi, which brings Bitcoin to pre-smartphone
feature phones.

If W3C can get Bitcoin and other decentralized payment media integrated
into the browser, I expect that we'll see a massive jump in what is
already a non-trivial amount of P2P international trade.

C.Evans



On 09/09/2013 09:46 PM, Manu Sporny wrote:
> This isn't just about a mathematical problem that needs to be solved,
> there is a large social and regulatory aspect to the problem that
> must be taken into account in the solution that we create. There is a
> large portion of the work that we do that has to be evangelized to
> the worlds financial community as well as those that don't have the
> time to read these sorts of discussions... The Internet
> Governance Forum (IGF) participation from this group is about
> educating world leaders about [**]the work we're doing here and how it
> can impact trade throughout the globe[**]. It's also about bringing what
> we learn from the meeting back into the technical work that this
> group is doing. -- manu