CoinGeek Weekly Livestream with Lorien Gamaroff: Making Bitcoin accessible worldwide with Centbee and BSV

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In the ever-evolving world of Bitcoin exists a company that chooses to focus on the original purpose of Bitcoin as envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin White paper: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Since its inception, Centbee wallet has been providing individuals with an easy transaction user experience when it comes to buying, keeping, and spending BSV.

In South Africa, where the fintech company is based, Centbee users can purchase prepaid electricity, airtime, and data from mobile networks. 

“Buying electricity in Africa can be a problem for people who don’t have credit cards, mobile wallets and bank apps,” says Centbee CEO Lorien Gamaroff. And for him, Bitcoin is the obvious solution. “The first thing I built was this way for people to buy electricity on their smart metres using Bitcoin.” Seeing this workout, Gamaroff was determined to get people worldwide to buy everything with Bitcoin.

As Gamaroff points out, there are complexities in trying to find merchants and integrating them into payment gateways. “It’s been extremely difficult to try and introduce new payment methods at retailers, especially if none of the customers are asking for it,” he says. But that didn’t stop him from pursuing his main objective. After many tries, Centbee came up with a strategy that worked.

“What we’ve done instead of going to the retailers themselves and try and integrate and build some kind of gateway into the existing points of sale is we try and get to people to be able to buy credit in a store because once you’ve got credit at the store, then you can take that credit and you go spend it like you would cash,” explained Gamaroff.

Since 2019, Centbee users in South Africa have been able to top up their wallets with BSV from thousands of retailers and are able to book an Uber ride, shop online, and spend their BSV at their favorite stores.

Despite the company’s many accomplishments in South Africa, the Centbee CEO says getting users to top up in other parts of the world is a constant struggle. He says, a major stumbling block are the banks. “This is still going to be difficult for a while, especially while were in this sort of regulatory grey zone where most banks have this kind of hard risk based approach and have these rules where no crypto purchases are allowed,” he explains.

He blames companies like BTC for its messaging saying, BTC’s messaging of trying to hide money outside of the banking system will only lead to its own destruction. For his part, “Crypto needs to die, for Bitcoin to succeed.”

Nevertheless, Centbee has managed to offer its international users options to use their BSV to make purchases. He implores users to try and top up.

“If you’re in one of the countries that we support, you do have to go through some verification, of course, because that’s one of the requirements as soon as you’re swapping your fiat for crypto, vice versa,” Gamaroff stated.

One of the newer features of Centbee is the Honey Rewards, a cashback reward system that aims to incentivize people to spend. Every time a user spends their Bitcoin, they will get a percentage of their spending back in BSV. Another way to get free BSV is to take a photo of the item they bought with their Centbee wallet, post it on Twitter, and tag Centbee.

As Gamaroff tells Kurt Wuckert Jr. in this episode of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, his passion has been to make Bitcoin accessible to every person on this planet and make Centbee the best wallet in the world in terms of payment. For his part, this can only be made possible with BSV. 

“There’s going to be one blockchain standing and Satoshi blockchain is the only one that works and the only one that can do all this stuff. So again, if we can just hang in there, if we can just do our best to keep this dream alive, encourage developers, encourage business businesses. Our time is coming,” he noted.

Watch the previous episodes of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream on YouTube.