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Dash in dominican republic?

Welcome to the forum nffox007! Glad to see you and your question. Personally, I've been asking myself about the potential of cryptocurrency for the Dominican market for some time now, because I live here. Theoretically HUGE potential, like in all developing countries. The practical problems however are huge as well:
  • Nobody knows about Cryptocurrencies here. Not even Bitcoin (I'm not talking about you and the 0.01% that might have heard about it. I'm talking about the 99.99%)
  • Try to explain Dash/Bitcoin/Crypto its inner workings and advantages to the people here. Without practical application, concrete use case - they won't even bother to listen.
  • General lack of trust in anything having to do with trusting a new something, someone with their very scarce moneys.
  • Only very few people will find time and energy to learn anything new, and the others are too busy trying to survive doing what they do to survive.
  • How should they even get started? Where to buy DASH without a bank account or with one with no money in it? Quickly fly over to Panama to find TigoCTMs ATM?
  • Level of education and curiosity are just generally way too low to expect people to do individual research (which is still highly necessary in the crypto sphere)
  • Until a new technology is not BIG in the TV, in Facebook, on Whatsapp and talked about EVERYWHERE, nobody cares. Once a new technology is BIG in the media and talked about EVERYWHERE, everybody cares.
An example how difficult marketing new payment service is for big business: Orange spent quite some time and probably huge amounts of money for advertising campaigns to push m-peso https://www.orange.com.do/web/servicios/orange-m-peso, the same as m-pesa, a system which is very popular and widely used in African countries like Kenya. In Dom.Rep., theoretically it would have been perfect for paying people. A solution to get rid of all the overhead, reduce time and security risk for most small to middle sized businesses that still continue to prepare salaries for their unbanked employees twice a month in envelopes and manually hand it over to them, somehow. Did m-peso gain any traction at all? Ask people on the street: Nobody ever heard of it. Ok, maybe it found a niche with some local drug dealers, but unbanked workers continue to get their money twice a month in envelopes. Banked workers line up for hours in front of ATMs and bank tellers to collect their salaries every 15th and the 30th of the month. Banking system and services here are so 19th century, but there is no alternative. Which brings us to the flip side of HUGE potential in countries like Dom.Rep.:
  • Nobody ever heard of Bitcoin, much less owns or uses it. Nor really cares about how it works. Which means that if Dash brings value of any kind to these people, they will embrace with very open arms.
  • Internet services grow more popular every day. But have a big problem to collect money. Paypal is not widely used with Dominicans. That leaves mostly just clumsy bank wires. (Some banks offer not very secure internet banking as a way to wire out money, but not a lot of people use it). => Offer easy payment set-up for websites, internet services/stores and actively market to them!
  • The young generation grows up and educates itself with smartphones which, not suprisingly, are important status symbols as well. => Make it easy for them to pay and be payed with their phone and you win them over!
  • Most of the unbanked here are in debt and don't open bank accounts for fear they could give their creditors a possibilty to collect their credit by letting the bank freeze the account. => Offer a solution for the unbanked to save their money securely on their phone!
What I'm trying to say is that DASH should think about developing a strategy for developing countries and the unbanked. Maybe it's early to think/speculate about becoming a bank for the unbanked before evolution is out. and we have more pressing problems atm, but at least people with money to allocate like Bill Gates https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/bill-gates-on-bitcoin-interesting-interview-june-2016.10685/ seem to be actively thinking about such strategies. In the long run it could just be that the poor and unbanked will decide on the long term success of crypto currency. Any currency able to cater to the unbanked, to become the "bank of the unbanked" might win it big. Please keep that in mind.
 
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