(Originally written for this Quora question, 20th July 2014.)

There’s a lot of hype regarding Bitcoin’s potential impact on developing economies, and it’s sometimes hard to separate the idle daydreams from the workable visions. We throw around hot concepts like “empowering the unbanked” and “building decentralized, trustless organizations,” but these are ultimately meaningless if the execution behind them isn’t up to snuff.

These past few months helping build a Bitcoin startup in the Philippines have been eye-opening to me, not just because of the massive learning curve inherent in cryptocurrency-based business, but also because of the kind of customer conversations I’ve been having.

Until very recently, Bitcoin was a rich man’s game here. To put it bluntly: 90% of the Philippines is living on less than P500.00 per day per household, a statistic that is perhaps most staggering when one considers that the accepted definition of extreme poverty is $2 per day per person. The vast majority of the our citizenry doesn’t even have enough money to eat 3 square meals, let alone allocate resources towards speculating on a fancy new digital currency.

But our efforts to bring crypto to the masses have found us dealing with more and more people from outside the A, B, and C tiers of the socio-economic strata. At the D and E levels, the relatively small daily prizes that our Bitcoin-powered selfie contest site gives away is significant enough for users to campaign for. And I’ve had more than a few conversations where a selfie contestant would panhandle outright as soon as they found out that I had built the darn thing.

To them, it’s not that Bitcoin is better money. It’s that it’s money. It’s money that they can work for and save up and use to buy things, where the current system has otherwise failed them. When you’re living on a combination of minimum wage and a stream of personal loans, any additional revenue stream is useful.

Bitcoin can be earned through faucets on the Internet, has zero maintaining balance, does not require a credit check, is corruption-resistant (politically and financially speaking), and can potentially grow in value over time. These aren’t just “cool features.” These features collectively represent the only financial services that these economic tiers could hope to be eligible for.

Whether or not these folks will eventually embrace Bitcoin is a question of tooling and education. We’ve got a long road ahead of us — and undoubtedly it will be paved with good intentions (to mix metaphors) — but on paper at least, BTC is a tremendously viable solution for the Philippines, if not the developing world in general.