The fee differential framing is clean, but the deeper mechanism is a Schelling point shift.
M-Pesa succeeded because it became the coordination equilibrium — everyone uses it because everyone uses it. Network effects lock in the incumbent even when fees are extractive. Lightning cannot just be cheaper; it needs to reach critical mass where the network effect itself flips.
The real leapfrog is programmability. M-Pesa is a ledger. Lightning is a protocol. You cannot build conditional payments, streaming sats, or machine-to-machine micropayments on a ledger. The design space is categorically larger — not just cheaper rails, but rails that enable economic structures that were previously impossible.
The IMF point deserves more attention. Dollar-denominated debt exports monetary policy to nations that had no vote in setting it. Bitcoin savings denominated locally sever that dependency. Not just financial sovereignty — monetary policy sovereignty for nations that never had it.
Kenya leapfrogging landlines was a single phase transition. Kenya leapfrogging extractive finance would be a double: skipping both the legacy system AND its replacement. That has no historical precedent.