This Malaysian taxi app is apparently the first in Asia to accept Bitcoin

One of the features that makes Uber so attractive to users is its ease of use, especially at the end of the ride when your credit card is automatically charged, and you can hop off without a care in the world.

Gone are the days of fumbling through your wallet when the taxi reaches your destination – or worse, finding out that you’re all out of hard cash, and the taxi driver doesn’t take Visa or Mastercard. It had such strong appeal that even competing taxi app EasyTaxi recently launched its own credit card payment facility, too.

Not to be outdone on its homeground, Malaysian taxi booking service TaxiMonger – which is available on iOS, Android, and has a web app, too – has gone a step further with the announcement that it now accepts bitcoin as an alternative payment method, according to Bitcoin Malaysia.

Claiming to be the first taxi app in Asia to offer this, TaxiMonger believes that the 1,400 or so taxi drivers who use its app will help accelerate bitcoin usage in Malaysia. No additional hardware is required to process a payment – users simply send their bitcoin to the mobile app, which will then be converted to Malaysian Ringgit and then disbursed daily to drivers. No processing fees are required, although both Uber and EasyTaxi do not currently take any additional fees either.

See: Malaysian taxi association calls for action against Uber