Pi in My Hometown, the Start of New Small Business Evolution?

over 3 years ago

Do you have Pi?

_{Mind you, conversation took place in a small town, 300km away from the capital city of Kuala Lumpur}

I was in shocked... to be honest... perhaps, a delightful surprise!

That was the question that was asked by the stall owner in a 100 year old wet market in Menglembu, Perak when I was thinking of purchasing a little more re-usable masks for my parents but I didn't have enough cash in hand and wanted to ask if they accept QR-Pay (Malaysia Banking Berhad's latest cash-less payment processor) for my purchase.

Menglembu, an outskirts small town almost 10km off from the capital city Ipoh in the State of Perak, was I suppose, on of the most innovated small town that has adopted cashless payment via Banking facilities since end of 2018.

I remembered the time when I took my mom over to have her hair cut, there was already Boost (e-wallet) service and QR-Pay (from Maybank) available for small business, from hair salon, to even a traditional medicine Sundry shop!

Those business were not managed by young Millennial or Gen-Z youngsters, in fact, they were actually managed by middle age to elderly individuals!

But crypto?? Does that even possible for small-town folks to fathom about its complexity? (from Mining to transfer)

Interestingly PI might have found a friendly solution.

I remembered when it first came out and some of my friends had a first hand experience was it was draining battery life pretty quickly. Needless to say from my procrastination after almost 1 year of delay I finally started testing on 2 of the oldest handphones I still have with me, just to see if it can cater lower OS platforms and could run it, making it totally available to young and old.

Until...

This was from my old Meizu M2 Note, after a factory reset, no Sim, no extra memory card.

_{I even shown this to @elizacheng haha....}

So needless to say, a half dead phone with still about 5GB memory left with 2GB RAM would definitely crack the application; but interestingly, it was still working for basic letting it run program; just that you can't really do anything more than that.

Screen captured from iPhone 6S, running on iOS 13

Then I tested on the good old iPhone 6S I acquired back in 2018 for a different platform testing for my work and I find out that despite that it's an old phone, Pi still worked pretty well on the iOS environment.

The only thing that I am not certain right now is how on earth transfers can be done because the seller actually told me that I could pay in PI to him; which I have no idea how this can be done just yet; maybe I didn't have enough PI to do so just yet.

Nevertheless, this has been quite an evolution because for stall sellers who were bold enough to try this yet-to-launch-in-mainnet coin and willing to accept as a payment medium, signifies that this could be a game changer for an alt-coin ever since BTC tried to use it as a medium of exchange over the hassle of banking (during the time e-banking wasn't popular yet).

Right now I am very curious and interested how this will play out as I managed to get 2 more senior citizens to join and try this out because the developers have made it is super easy to sign up just with a click , a phone number and a referral name, and I am even more interested to see how the marketing team / ambassadors manage to work with the SME (Small Medium Enterprise) to avail themselves to accept PI while people can pay in PI later.

Million dollar question... Would it overtake BTC?

So far I am not certain, the way it has adjust itself to be hassle free passive mining on a phone and only to collect once a day where even Senior citizens (who are hardest to re-educate) can understand, this could just be the gig for bank-account-in-your-pocket for day-to-day commerce activities.

I am both cautious and excited. The best thing is that, I only needed to avail my old phone to let it run itself.

Now that it is availing itself for node for PCs and Servers, this could really be an interesting ride. Unfortunately, apparently only Windows 10 environment is the easiest to set up, I am looking at older version server Windows applications compliance to mine from an idle server to see if it could really contribute and be part of the mining chain.

Have you signed up for Pi?

Do share your thoughts here!

If not, do come and join me in this experiment together! It is already available in App Store and Google Play. Use littlenewthings as the introduced name. Then I can chat with you there as well.

^{As of 6:30pm GMT+8}

I have completed a 1 day mining an had a privileged to talk to the developers a little more.

So apparently in order to collect your fully mined Pi coins, you will need to go through KYC, which is Know Your Customer.

One of the reason is that they want to curb farming and only legit for real humans with only one device to earn a fair daily mining

unless you managed to get the entire village / community around you to sign up under your mining network.

And yes, I have tried logging in 2 different devices to see if it increases to mining statistic - the answer is NO.

So this is something I like about the curbing mining abuse here; because only one person with one ID can own one PI account.

And I think I heard that you got to be above 18 to be eligible to mine.

Interesting eh?

The cons

People who are very much love to keep their ID out of the network system to remain anonymous will definitely not be benefited by this new evolution of mining. Unlike BTC (and other pioneer Alt-coins), even though many wallets are required with KYC, many still can remain anonymous.

Therefore, anarchists who defies and wants to be off grid will not benefit from this social mining experience.

However

KYC will be very good for legit law abiding merchants, enterprises, NGOs and small businesses to conduct fiat-free environment businesses; and that is something that I think the core team wants it achieved.

And I think the stall seller of masks would have thought the same thing.

Have you Signed up for Pi?

Do share your thoughts here!

If not, do come and join me in this experiment together! It is already available in App Store and Google Play. Use littlenewthings as the introduced name. Then I can chat with you there as well.