Elon Musk of Bitcoin—Centbee’s Lorien Gamaroff talks about making Bitcoin easy to use
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Lorien Gamaroff and Elon Musk share quite a few similarities – they both have South African origins, and they both started with a vision to make payments easier and cheaper over the Internet. The Centbee founder is still hard at work on the latter, and as he told CoinGeek Backstage, the BSV wallet is growing beyond Africa and impacting lives globally.
“Elon started building his payments company on this innovative technology called the Internet — that’s exactly what I’ve done … If he can build spaceships today, I think that’s very much my future,” he told CoinGeek Backstage host Jon Southhurst.
The Bitcoin industry is not short of wallets. Centbee stands out by focusing on adoption and actual daily use. Starting in Johannesburg, South Africa, the wallet has taken an innovative approach to its users, integrating local merchants that seamlessly load Centbee wallets for users.
“Since the first days I heard about Bitcoin, and it’s cash, I’ve wanted to find ways to get it into people’s hands so they can easily acquire Bitcoin and then easily spend it. That’s been my focus for the last 12 years,” noted Lorien.
Starting in South Africa presented unique challenges, but for Lorien he saw opportunities. Knowing that retailers would not be willing to change their payment systems, he introduced retail credits and gift cards into Centbee. This has opened up thousands of outlets stretching from South Africa to the UK, India to the US.
Grows outside of Africa
As Lorien likes to say, “Our roots are in Africa, but we’re everywhere,” and indeed the company is gaining a large user base outside of its home continent. In the Philippines, it has integrated the very popular mobile wallet GCash, making it easy for users to use Bitcoin.
We love #Philippines 🇵🇭
And #filipinos ❤️ #Centbee!Fill yours #GCash with #Centbee and serve #Bitcoinˢᵛ #HoneyRewards🍯
User @GCashOfficial app, you can pay for items and send money at the speed of a text message.
🐝💚💸#Rewards pic.twitter.com/NljPyhGZDh
— Centbee (@Centbee) 21 June 2022
With this integration, Centbee opened up a whole new market, with overseas Filipinos sending money back home. Also, users don’t need to know about or like Bitcoin.
“Once you start using Centbee, the whole idea of using Bitcoin becomes completely doable for those people who wouldn’t normally use Bitcoin because they thought it was too complex. We’ve made it very simple,” he said.
Lorien, along with co-founder Angus Brown, have built Centbee to be more than just a wallet. As he pointed out, it has borrowed heavily from social media platforms, aiming to make Centbee “a social networking app where media is money.” This puts the wallet in a prime position to target people who were previously averse to Bitcoin.
Many Bitcoin payment applications face one major challenge – price fluctuations – but not Centbee. Lorien noted that BSV is not a speculative asset for most of its users. Instead, they only keep the BSV for as long as they need before making a payment or sending it to friends and family in other countries. As such, by holding it for short periods of time, Bitcoin does not lose much value.
Remittance is a big business for Centbee. However, the company has for the longest time handled the remittance aspects under a different infrastructure in Minit Money. Earlier this year, Lorien announced at the BSV Global Blockchain Convention that remittance was now integrated into Centbee.
With this expansion, Centbee now supports money transfers from all parts of the world, not just in African corridors as it was with Minit Money. The recipients also don’t need to know anything about Bitcoin and can have it deposited directly into their bank accounts or even mobile wallets. This makes Bitcoin plumbing for a robust financial system, just as Satoshi Nakamoto always intended.
See: BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, BSV for Retail Payments, Remittances & Rewards
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