What's offensive is that you apparently didn't even bother to read the article or think about the differences -- both theoretical and practical -- between Bitcoin and this, but instead just jumped to a known buzzword.

This has nothing to do with bitcoin. Bitcoin is a completely separate currency with its own value.

This is just a digital solution to transmit existing currency.

A more apt comment would be that paypal (or any number of similar services) did this already.

In fact, though, none of these similar services have done anything close to this.

When you have 50% of the population using a digital payment solution for all of their money needs... then maybe you can make a comparison.

I don't know much about Bitcoin, but I think the distinction is in how many people are using the service. A big part of that seems to be platform compatibility. These people are able to use it on their cheap Nokia cell phones rather than needing a computer to use Bitcoin. The impression I got from the article was that payments are done via text message, so you may not even need a data plan for it.

I would agree, totally different use-cases.

Also, M-Pesa was launched in 2007, Bitcoin in 2009. So the "already" is a bit imprecise, too.

Actually, creating SMS bitcoin wallet is possible (however it won't be that easy to use). I will probably hack together SMS wallet support for easywallet.org . Meanwhile there is coinapult SMS wallet, but it is only for canada/US.

Internet hipster facepalm.

The fact that he is catastrophically wrong does not justify flaming him. Just downvote and move on.