Marc Andreesen made a comment on a recent a16z podcast that they were interested in the challenges of global remittances. This seems like a related interest: How can we use technology to provide credit, transfer and remittance services to a user base that may be exclusively using mobile phones and/or in emerging markets with limited internet access? There are likely a number of industries where this pattern can be repeated.
This is a big thing in emerging markets—in some countries, even the people who don't have food, power, or water infrastructure have cheap Chinese smartphone and ubiquitous 3G/LTE data. In there market's in particular, there's a pending shift for small businesses to move away from cash and to electronic payments, which opens up a whole 'nother world in terms of relationships with financial institutions, access to credit, etc.
Not really. The underlying currency—be it bitcoin, USD, yen, rand, or rupees—still requires lenders, payment systems, institutional agreements, and general technical enablement. At that point it's all 1s and 0s anyway.
