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Introducing Blockchain: Tomorrow’s Railroads

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Abstract

Why did mobile money take off in Kenya before the US? The answer lies in the concept of being “good enough.” Faced with constant risk of robbery, M-Pesa provided an attractive alternative to carrying and storing cash. In the same way that prior to mobile and railroads, telephone and transportation infrastructure was weaker in developing countries, today’s equivalent lies in transactions infrastructure—the networks of accountability and trust that connect economic activity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Christensen, Clayton M. 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

  2. 2.

    Shah, Rahul, et al. 2019. The Digital Banking and Tech Revolution in EM. Tellimer. https://insights.tellimer.com/article/the-digital-banking-and-tech-revolution-in-em. Accessed 1 April 2020.

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    Mbele, Lerato. 2016. Why M-Pesa Failed in South Africa. BBC Africa Business Report, 11 May. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-36260348. Accessed 26 December 2018.

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    Chan, Connie. 2015. When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China. Andreessen Horowitz, 6 August. https://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/. Accessed 12 February 2019.

  5. 5.

    For more details on the usage of mobile phones in the Indian fishing industry, see https://www.ictworks.org/surprise-fishermen-using-mobile-phones-for-market-prices-is-the-largest-lie-in-ict4d and Steyn, Jacques. 2016. A Critique of the Claims about Mobile Phones and Kerala Fisherman: The Importance of the Context of Complex Social Systems. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries 74(3): 1–31.

  6. 6.

    International Finance Corporation. 2018. Digital Access: The Future of Financial Inclusion in Africa. https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/region__ext_content/ifc_external_corporate_site/sub-saharan+africa/resources/201805_report_digital-access-africa.

  7. 7.

    https://www.enterprisesurveys.org/en/data/exploretopics/corruption.

  8. 8.

    https://www.enterprisesurveys.org/en/data/exploretopics/innovation-and-technology.

  9. 9.

    https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1045088576533405702.

  10. 10.

    https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.

  11. 11.

    https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-era-of-move-fast-and-break-things-is-over.

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Domjan, P., Serkin, G., Thomas, B., Toshack, J. (2021). Introducing Blockchain: Tomorrow’s Railroads. In: Chain Reaction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51784-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51784-7_1

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