> people who are so poor that they don't have reliable access to banking services very often are lacking reliable access to internet connected computing devices
That's absolutely true when you get to the bottom ~3-4 billion people in the world. However it also used to be true about the ~2 billion people above them as well. Mobile banking - smart phones - have legitimately reshaped that for people in nations that have for example GDP per capita levels of around $3,000 to $8,000. It wasn't very long ago that the context for those people wasn't too dissimilar to that of what third world people are still dealing with today. Go back before ~2009 in small to mid size towns in Romania, Vietnam or Nigeria; today these people widely have access to easy, relatively secure banking via their phones. In the near future their mobile banking systems will provide easy access to something like Bitcoin as well, and obviously some of them already are.
That's absolutely true when you get to the bottom ~3-4 billion people in the world. However it also used to be true about the ~2 billion people above them as well. Mobile banking - smart phones - have legitimately reshaped that for people in nations that have for example GDP per capita levels of around $3,000 to $8,000. It wasn't very long ago that the context for those people wasn't too dissimilar to that of what third world people are still dealing with today. Go back before ~2009 in small to mid size towns in Romania, Vietnam or Nigeria; today these people widely have access to easy, relatively secure banking via their phones. In the near future their mobile banking systems will provide easy access to something like Bitcoin as well, and obviously some of them already are.