Without commenting on your first 3 points, I'd argue that a 3rd world country could potentially be an excellent place to gain mass adoption.
In the U.S. we have credit cards and fixed addresses to mail bills. There's probably a billion people who don't have this. There is absolutely an opportunity in 3rd world countries to leapfrog credit card systems, which for a variety of reasons don't work in these environments.
There's a mobile phone currency company in Kenya called MPesa which is currently processing 20% of the countries GDP! There's simply no way you could get that adoption in the U.S. that fast, since you'd have to displace VISA, Mastercard, and debit cards...no easy feat.
So OP is working on a hard problem, but its doable.
IIRC, M-Pesa was launched by the dominant mobile phone carrier in Kenya. Its not exactly a model that a typical lean-startup even has an ice cube's chance in hell of success with.
Just to clarify, I dont think that its impossible for a lean-startup to be successful in mobile payments, but I doubt that they can do that just by emulating m-pesa.
That is (genuinely) a great point, but I would ask what this mobile currency is based on - the country's currency? Is it mined like bitcoin? Processing payments via mobile phone bills is a different beast than creating a new currency, IMHO...but then again, maybe I am not understanding these companies correctly. :)
you may not have heard of m-pesa - which arose out of people being able to transfer mobile minutes and then became a fully fledge mobile currency in it's own right.. as xtrumanx says (below) m-pesa is huge. you might also note that this has already happened ;-)
In the U.S. we have credit cards and fixed addresses to mail bills. There's probably a billion people who don't have this. There is absolutely an opportunity in 3rd world countries to leapfrog credit card systems, which for a variety of reasons don't work in these environments.
There's a mobile phone currency company in Kenya called MPesa which is currently processing 20% of the countries GDP! There's simply no way you could get that adoption in the U.S. that fast, since you'd have to displace VISA, Mastercard, and debit cards...no easy feat.
So OP is working on a hard problem, but its doable.