Cryptocurrency: Check Your Financial Privilege

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Check Your Financial Privilege

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-privilege

In the eyes of most Western elites, investors, journalists and
academics, Bitcoin rates anywhere from an annoyance to a disaster.

Just a few days ago, American billionaire Charlie Munger described
Bitcoin as “disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.”
Warren Buffett, once the world’s richest person, sat next to Munger in
obvious agreement. He has said Bitcoin is “a delusion” and “rat poison
squared,” and has warned that he is sorry about its rise “because
people get their hopes up that something like that is gonna change
their lives.” Bill Gates, who also used to be the world’s richest
person, has said Bitcoin is a “greater fool theory” investment, and
that he would short it, if he could.

HBO host Bill Maher skewered Bitcoin in an extended segment on his
show, saying that the new currency’s promoters are “money-hungry
opportunists.” A few weeks earlier, The New York Times ran a story
that said Bitcoin will “ruin the planet.” Financial Times columnist
Martin Wolf has long pegged it as “ideal for criminals, terrorists,
and money launderers.”

Prominent Ivy League economist Jeffrey Sachs has said that Bitcoin
offers “nothing of social value,” while former International Monetary
Fund (IMF) chief and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde
has called it a tool for “totally reprehensible money laundering
activity.”

Over the past decade, these financial experts, reporters and
policymakers have continuously pounded the narrative that Bitcoin is
risky, dangerous, bad for humans and bad for the planet.

They are wrong, and they are blinded mainly by their financial privilege.
How Financial Privilege Blinds Dollar Users To Bitcoin’s Importance

The critics cited above are all wealthy citizens of advanced
economies, where they benefit from liberal democracy, property rights,
free speech, a functioning legal system and relatively stable reserve
currencies like the dollar or pound.

In reality, only 13% of our planet’s population is born into the
dollar, euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Australian dollar, Canadian
dollar or Swiss Franc. The other 87% are born into autocracy or
considerably less trustworthy currencies. 4.3 billion people live
under authoritarianism, and 1.2 billion people live under double- or
triple-digit inflation.

Critics in the dollar bubble miss the bigger global picture: that
anyone with access to the internet can now participate in Bitcoin, a
new money system with equal rules for all participants, running on a
network that does not censor or discriminate, used by individuals who
do not need to show a passport or an ID and held by citizens in a way
that is hard to confiscate and impossible to debase.

While Western headlines focus on Coinbase going public, Tesla buying
billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin and tech bros getting fabulously
rich, there is a quiet revolution happening worldwide. Until now,
governments and corporations have controlled the rules of money. That
is changing.

To learn more, the author spoke to Bitcoin users in Sudan, Nigeria and
Ethiopia, three countries with a combined population of 366 million,
well in excess of the number of individuals living in the United
States.

The three speak for millions whose lived experience is much closer to
that of the average person on this planet. Gates, Munger and Buffett
may not have recently dealt with conflict and violence, black markets,
relentless inflation, political repression, and rampant corruption in
their daily routine, but most do.

And yet, these Bitcoiners are more hopeful for the future than the
doomers listed above. For them, Bitcoin is a protest, a lifeline and a
way out.

Here are their stories.
Bitcoin In Nigeria

Ire Aderinokun is a Nigerian entrepreneur. She is a front-end
developer and user interface designer from Lagos and is the cofounder,
COO and vice president of engineering at Buycoins, a cryptocurrency
exchange that went through Y Combinator in 2018 and is now one of the
most popular places to buy bitcoin in West Africa. She is a prolific
writer, speaker, organizer and activist and one of the founding
members of the Feminist Coalition, a group that champions equality for
women in Nigerian society.

Aderinokun talked about Nigeria as a melting pot, like the U.S. of
Africa. Three big ethnic groups dominate the country, but the
population is split into hundreds of different tribes. This is a
strength, but also a challenge, as it is hard to bring so many
different people together. The country is governed through a
predominantly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south, and
the national leadership rotates between these constituencies. Nigeria
has the largest economy in Africa, and the largest population with
more than 200 million citizens, but much of the wealth is tied to the
export of oil.

Like in many rentier states, there is massive corruption and
inequality: while the fabulously rich jetset around the world, six
Nigerians are impoverished every minute. People who have wealth and
power, Aderinokun said, do not let it trickle down. This has resulted
in a situation where in major urban areas such as Abuja and Lagos,
there are countless lawyers, for instance, working in restaurants,
toiling away in careers that are professionally beneath them, because
there are not enough opportunities. Millions head to the big cities
for jobs, only to come up empty handed.

As a result, Aderinokun said the country struggles with unemployment,
especially among the youth. 62% of the population is under 25 years
old. Out of this crisis, however, are upsides. She credits Nigerians
with being incredibly entrepreneurial. People do what they need to do
to get by, and having a side hustle, she said, is natural.

Part of this need to hustle relates to the country’s economic
situation, where the official inflation rate now stands around 15%,
with food inflation even higher. In her personal experience,
Aderinokun has seen the naira decline from 100 per dollar to 500 per
dollar. People, she said, are quite aware that the elites are stealing
from the citizens through debasement. It is expected. So much so that
when one’s family or friend gets a government job, she said, there is
an assumption that they will provide for you and a circle of others.
The money trickles down through nepotism and the people at the top get
fat. This is an example of the Cantillon effect in action, where those
closest to the point of money creation benefit at the expense of the
rest.

Growing up, she saw people try to keep their money in dollars, or send
it abroad or buy real estate. This was how Nigerians could protect the
fruits of their time and energy, but only a handful had these options.
Now, Bitcoin is changing the game, allowing more people to save like
never before. Anyone with internet access now has an escape from their
unreliable and exploitative national monetary system.

Aderinokun got her start in Bitcoin with a Coinbase account in 2016.
She and her friends initially thought: could we use this new
technology to send money abroad? As it turned out, Bitcoin was easier
and faster for sending money from Nigeria to the U.S. than traditional
means. So she decided to launch BuyCoins. Paystack — the Nigerian tech
giant — was just a few years old then and she is grateful that it
existed at the time, as it allowed BuyCoins to reach customers and
create an experience that otherwise would have been impossible.

At first, the payment component of Bitcoin was what really attracted
Aderinokun, the idea that it could be easy instead of hard to send
money from one place to another, skipping over national borders. This,
she thought, is something Bitcoin can fix.

Beyond the exchange itself, BuyCoins also released an app called
SendCash. At first, it helped people outside of Nigeria send money
home. Perhaps a family member moved to the U.S., and they want to send
dollars back. The recipient would normally need a domiciliary account
in dollars, but Aderinokun said those are difficult to open. Even
then, going from dollars to naira can be hard. They thought: could
Bitcoin help streamline the process?

With SendCash, users in the U.S. send bitcoin to the app, and it
deposits as naira a few minutes later in any Nigerian bank account.
Today, the app also sends naira to the U.S. or Ghana, all using
bitcoin as a payment rail.

Aderinokun said that around 45% of the Nigerian population has
internet access. So is her mission worth it, if a majority of
Nigerians still cannot even access Bitcoin? She said this is a dilemma
she often ponders. There are countless IDPs (internally-displaced
persons) across Nigeria who cannot accept cryptocurrency because they
do not have a smartphone. In the end, she said, the work and mission
is worth it, because even though there are many who do not have a
feature phone or smartphone, there are millions who do, and those
individuals are sharing access to smart apps with those who do not
have them.

As for the Gates and Buffets of the world: Aderinokun said some of
Bitcoin’s critics may have valid points to debate, around, for
example, the environmental impact — but she takes issue with Western
elites saying there is no upside, or that it is a ponzi scheme, or
that it is just for fun.

They do not understand, she said, how important Bitcoin is for those
who cannot get dollars. For billions, they are trapped in a flawed
currency that does not fulfill the purpose of what currency is
supposed to do. For many in Nigeria and beyond, Bitcoin is providing
another option and solving real problems.

Is it just helping the rich? Aderinokun laughed and said: this is not
the case at all. It is providing employment, it is helping people
convert their naira to other currencies, it is enabling commerce where
it was not previously possible. With the Feminist Coalition, it helped
people overcome financial repression and the freezing of activist bank
accounts. This is not, she said, just a case of people sitting around
watching the price.

Moving forward, Aderinokun thinks more education is essential.
Nigerians are still very misinformed about Bitcoin. The main reason
they know about it, she said, is because the price keeps going up, and
many do not see past that. Scams are a huge obstacle. Finally though,
she said, people are beginning to understand. They know bitcoin is
volatile, but they see that it goes up and to the right over time,
instead of down and to the right like the naira.

She also wants to focus on building bridges and ramps between the
naira and cryptocurrencies. BuyCoins works with a naira stablecoin,
the NGNT, which she said can also be helpful to people without
traditional bank accounts.

And building on- and off-ramps matters, because the Nigerian
government has BuyCoins and other exchanges in its crosshairs.
Recently, the regime pronounced Bitcoin as not legal tender and said
banks should not hold or treat it as such. They later clarified that
individuals could still trade, but have pressured regulated financial
institutions to stay away. BuyCoins has been struggling to hold naira
because banks do not want to work with it. But now, Aderinokun said,
it has shifted to a peer-to-peer solution. When users need to go in
and out of naira, depositors and withdrawals are matched in a
marketplace.

Aderinokun does not actually think it is possible to effectively ban
Bitcoin. The most the government can do, perhaps, is what it has
already done — forcing institutions to stay away. But it cannot stop
individuals from using hardware wallets or conducting peer-to-peer
activity in a place like Nigeria. No one, she said, can stop me. It is
like saying it could ban Facebook, she said. It could shut down the
internet, but that would have disastrous consequences for the whole
nation.

What the government should be doing instead, she said, is trying to
understand Bitcoin, and working with exchanges to allow Nigerians to
connect to the world around them. Aderinokun does not think the
government should have an adversarial attitude. In fact, she believes
Bitcoin can help it. Maybe it would even be a good thing if the
Nigerian government figured out Bitcoin before other nations. But, she
said, for the moment it is not even close to understanding how Bitcoin
works. When asked if it is using blockchain surveillance or spying on
individual transactions, she laughed. It does not have the abilities
or know-how yet, she said.

As for the future, Aderinokun is hopeful, because she has seen
Bitcoin’s potential. She watched it shine in the context of human
rights and activism. Last October, in the middle of nationwide
protests against SARS, a notorious special police unit that was
terrorizing citizens across the country, the Feminist Coalition began
accepting donations via Flutterwave, a fintech product. This started
off well enough, but then the regime started cracking down. Its bank
accounts were shuttered.

Bitcoin was the only option left. There was no other way to receive,
store and spend money. For Aderinokun and her cofounders, this was an
eye-opening moment. They ended up setting up a BTCPay server to
process gifts from around the world in a way that avoided address
reuse and protected donor privacy. Celebrities including Jack Dorsey
shared the link, and they raised more than 7 BTC.

It was a great learning experience, she said, as many young people
learned about Bitcoin in this moment as a tool for activism. The
experience renewed and strengthened her belief in products she is
building at BuyCoins. People saw that Bitcoin was cool, and that the
government could not stop it. Because of this, Aderinokun thinks that
one day, Bitcoin will be talked about in the same way, with the same
importance, as radio, the TV and the internet.

Asked if she is worried about a world where the government can no
longer control the money, she said no, she is hopeful. Just printing
more money, she said, has its downsides. Taking that option away is
not necessarily a bad thing.
Bitcoin In Sudan

Mo, also known as Sudan HODL, is a Sudanese doctor. He currently lives
abroad in Europe, practicing medicine to support his family back home.

Mo sees his country with brutally clear eyes. He described the capital
of Khartoum as a crowded, diverse megacity, filled with pockets of
extravagant wealth, surrounded by an enormous belt of poverty. It is a
city of contradictions, he said, where palatial residences sit next to
utter destitution.

Mo has worked in Darfur, where he described the lack of development as
simply stunning. There is no educational or health infrastructure.
During his time there, he was one of three or four doctors treating
hundreds of thousands of people. There was a total lack of primary
care and there were no pediatric hospitals. He was treating women who
suffered from fistula. The national ruling class, he said, did not
invest in these places. Warlords ultimately filled the power vacuum,
with the youth choosing violence instead of school as a way to get
ahead.

Mo told a tortured history of his country. Sudan, he said, has been
living through a vicious cycle of military coups and authoritarian
rule ever since gaining its independence from the British Empire and
losing its fragile first democracy.

Islam, Mo said, did not come to Sudan by violence but through traders
and Sufis. He said his Muslim ancestors historically had a peaceful
interpretation of their religion. But in the 1980s, the rise of Saudi
Arabia’s oil wealth led to the export of the extremist and militant
ideology of Wahhabism to many places around the world, including
Sudan. Wahhabism was foreign to Sudan’s culture but was forced into
the country’s political structure.

By 1983, military governments had allied themselves with the Muslim
Brotherhood and imposed Sharia law, alienating the predominantly
Christian and animist south. A democratic revolution in 1985 was
short-lived, as Islamists led by Omar al-Bashir staged another coup in
1989, paving the way for three decades of his rule. Society was
militarized and the intelligentsia were purged. Now if one spoke out
against the regime, Mo said, they were not just speaking out against
them: they were speaking against Islam. They were against God himself.
This gave Bashir an excuse for his brutality and new jihads against
ethnic minorities.

Since colonial times, minorities in South Sudan and Darfur had
resisted authority from strongmen in far-away Khartoum. The seeds of
this tension were planted in the 1950s when these populations fell
under postcolonial Arab rule. Over time, these minority groups
rebelled, only to be violently subjugated. The bloodshed peaked in
Darfur in the early 2000s, when Bashir committed genocide, using the
Janjaweed militias to murder hundreds of thousands and displace
millions of people. This triggered the U.S. and EU to increase
sanctions against Sudan, cutting it off more deeply from the outside
world.

Mo thinks it is important to share Sudan’s economic history, often
overshadowed by the political story. In addition to the extreme
inequality on display in Khartoum, there is a bigger picture of
low-income workers trying to catch up to high inflation, while those
closer to the regime managed to do well. Infrastructure decayed and
the average person suffered while Bashir and his cronies loaded up on
weapons, real estate and foreign assets. Modern Sudan is another vivid
and tragic example of the Cantillon effect.

It was not always like this. Mo said that under the gold standard,
three Sudanese pounds once bought a dollar. There was a middle class,
and Khartoum was known as the London of North Africa. But in 1960, the
Sudanese central bank took over and devalued the currency, the first
instance of what would happen many times over the coming decades.

When Bashir seized power in 1989, he installed a regime of economic
terrorism. To instill fear in the population, he chose to make an
example of a young man named Majdi Mahjoub, who was a single child
living at home, looking after his elderly parents. A Christian
minority in a community of traders, Majdi had possession of a few
thousand U.S. dollars in his home, the result of many years of family
commerce.

Bashir created a new special “economic” division, a sort of secret
police, that would go home to home, searching for foreign currency or
gold. When the jack-booted thugs came to Majdi’s house, they found his
savings and arrested him. After a show trial, he was hanged, sending a
message to the population: if anyone tries to use anything but the
Sudanese currency through our banking system — if anyone tries to own
their own money — they will get the death sentence. Even today,
according to Mo, many Sudanese are fearful of using dollars or storing
money at home.

At the same time, Bashir launched a tribute system to finance his
activities. On top of what was taken through traditional taxation and
seigniorage, citizens had to pay a portion of their income to help the
martyrs of their dictator’s wars. The secret monetary police would spy
on individuals, freeze bank accounts, confiscate assets and impose
made-up fees on merchants. No reasonable suspicion was required. Mo
calls it a system of national extortion.

As far as the currency itself, Mo recalled several times in his life
when the system was overhauled. In the late 1980s, his family was
living abroad in Saudi Arabia, and when they visited home, a quarter
of a Sudanese pound could buy a sandwich or a tasty snack on the
street. But after 1992, when Bashir changed the haram and colonial
pound for the Islamic dinar, those quarter pounds became worthless.
The mid-1990s saw massive inflation, with the “official rate” of the
dinar going from around 400 per dollar to more than 2,000. Many years
later, in 2007, Bashir decided to ditch the Islamic facade and switch
back to the pound. Citizens had a small window to redeem dinars for
the new currency, after which they were no longer legal tender,
forcing citizens to surrender their savings or watch it disappear.

Today, after a series of devaluations and constant inflation, a
Sudanese pound will officially obtain around .0025 dollars. According
to Mo, inflation is 340%. While the average citizen watched as their
wages stagnated and living costs rose, Bashir and his cronies
accumulated billions and saved them in foreign currencies, locked away
in Swiss bank accounts. Today the new Sudanese government is
struggling to regain all that was looted and lost in the past 30
years.

In the spring of 2019, in a stunning example of people power, the
Sudanese population finally pushed out Bashir. Since then, a fragile
reform government has been in place, where military leaders of the old
regime share power with a technocratic civilian government. People
were initially optimistic about the change, Mo said, but the reality
is not meeting their expectations.

He says the IMF has a deal to help give $5 per month to Sudanese
families, and in a country where some only make a dollar a day, this
seemed significant. The problem is, the families are paid not in
dollars but in pounds, so the value disappears after a few months. The
sanctions levied on the Bashir regime are now gone, but most fintech
products and payment apps are still not available for Sudanese, as
corporations shy away due to “risk management.”

It is clear that in some places, a political revolution is not enough.
Toppling a tyrant like Bashir is a historical and incredible
achievement. But people are still suffering. So some, like Mo, are
turning to Bitcoin.

In 2015, Mo first heard about this mysterious internet money, as he
put it, on YouTube. He spent countless hours watching Andreas
Antonopolous videos and read through “The Internet Of Money,” which
helped him understand the “why” behind the new currency. He started to
use it while working abroad, exchanging euros for bitcoin over PayPal
on LocalBitcoins. He kept things small and mainly to himself. But in
2017, he started talking to family and friends. He told them: this is
going to be a part of our future. Many of them are now saving in
bitcoin.

As of today, Mo estimates that 13 million of Sudan’s 43 million people
have internet access, and he thinks that in a few years, that number
will top 20 million. There are more and more people coming online, and
there are now smartphones even in remote regions like Darfur and the
Nuba Mountains. People are plugging in everywhere.

He said that the Sudanese who do already have smartphones have an
extended responsibility to help others with their privilege. In his
case, he has a large extended family that he supports. He is their
Uncle Jim.

Where there were once financial walls cutting off Sudan from the
world, Bitcoin has made bridges. It is now easy for Mo in Europe to
send money back to his friends and family. What once took days now
takes minutes. And he does not have to trust any third parties or
require his family to deal with thieves in government.

Mo is beginning to see just how massive the Lightning Network will be
for Sudan because most users will be in the micropayment space,
sending transactions of $5 or $10, and will not be able to afford the
increasingly high on-chain fees. If international exchanges can choose
to service Sudan, and enable Lightning withdrawals and deposits, he
said that would be an enormous step forward for financial empowerment.

As for the likes of Bill Gates and Buffet, Mo said they might
understand the technology behind Bitcoin, but they will never be happy
about it because it is coming to seize a place on the global stage
that they used to have just for themselves. In direct contradiction to
billionaire claims that Bitcoin is worthless and has no social value,
Mo knows many Sudanese who rely on it as a lifeline. Maybe, Mo said,
the critics just cannot see past their financial privilege.

For Mo personally, Bitcoin has been transformative. He has started a
podcast in Arabic for Sudanese youth to talk about Bitcoin, money,
freedom and the future of their country. Fifteen years ago he could
not have imagined being this optimistic.

One of the darkest moments in his life was in 2013 after a peaceful
political uprising was completely crushed. Mo left all social media.
He could not bear to look at the bloody images and videos streaming
from the violence. But now, with twin political and economic
transformations, he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. When
people say Bitcoin is hope, he says that he agrees.
Bitcoin In Ethiopia

Kal Kassa is an Ethiopian businessman. In a country of close to 120
million people, more than 70% of the population has no access to a
bank account. This is a place, he said, where there are still
communities that use salt for money.

In the remote northeast Afar region, dotted with volcanoes, rifts and
deserts, the indigenous people mine salt, as they have for
generations, and trek for days to barter it in markets for the goods
they need. It is their store of value, medium of exchange and unit of
account. The word amole, Amharic for salt, is even used today in
Ethiopia as the name of a mobile banking app.

According to Kal, 70% of Ethiopians still live in rural areas. Outside
of the capital of Addis Ababa, home to 5 million, very few have bank
accounts or smartphones. In total, no more than 25 million Ethiopians
are connected. To make matters worse, Ethiopia does not have open
capital markets. Individuals cannot freely exchange their national
currency — the birr — with dollars, and vice versa. Sadly, Kassa said,
the country is still under the influence of militant marxism and
economic centralization.

Today, there is a bank rate that the National Bank of Ethiopia
enforces at 40 birr per dollar, and then a black market rate of 55
birr per dollar. Inflation is officially reported at around 20%. Kassa
is not sure what the exact rate is, but said that Ethiopians
traditionally buy a chicken or sheep or lamb for Easter, and these
prices go up steadily every year. When he arrived in Ethiopia in 2013
to start a consulting job, one lamb went for around 1,500 birr. Today,
it can go for 5,000 or even 7,000 birr.

Government wages do grow, Kassa said, but not on par with inflation.
He estimated salaries in urban areas have perhaps doubled over the
past decade, but goods have gone up by three-to-five times. Since
inflation is so high and such a constant phenomenon, the upper classes
use the dollar as their unit of account. But outside of the cities,
people still account with, and their living standards fall with, the
birr. In rural areas, people use cattle or sheep to store value. If
they can, they obtain gold, which is rare and still considered very
precious. Dollars are officially illegal.

The government is afraid that people will dump the birr for dollars,
pushing the price of the birr toward zero. But the government operates
a double standard, wanting to retain as many dollars as it can for its
own purposes. If, for example, one runs a tourist service, they are
allowed to take payments into a dollar account, which they can use to
pay for imported goods for up to around two months. But if they do not
use those dollars within that window, the government simply swaps the
dollars out for birr at the official rate. Which, of course, means
they get the fake price of 40 birr for one dollar, and not the real
market rate of 55.

Kassa’s brother was arrested and imprisoned once simply because he had
$20 in his pocket. In Ethiopia, people are jailed for the crime of
using better currency.

Starting in 2018, Ethiopia underwent a series of reforms under a young
new leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to end
hostilities with neighboring Eritrea. The shifts appeared to open up
political space and move the country toward liberalism after more than
25 years of a police state. Three years later, however, repression,
ethnic tensions and armed conflict have caused a democratic backslide.
This uncertainty has caused major capital flight. On top of that,
Ethiopia imports more than it exports: oil, medical goods and cars,
for example, are all brought in from other countries.

In this weak environment, Ethiopians are forced to buy government
bonds, which, as Kassa dryly noted, have negative real interest rates.
They are, as he put it, donations for the state.

Kassa was born in Ethiopia, but left as a young child, growing up in
California. He moved back at the end of 2013, as a senior associate
for Grant Thornton, working on privatization on the buy and sell
sides. He lived there until last summer when the government shut off
the internet.

Kassa’s phone could still send SMS messages and make calls, but there
was no data. The regime justified this as a defense against
rebellions, but especially during the pandemic lockdown, this got old
very quickly. So, last summer, wearing just a backpack, he got on a
plane and headed back to the U.S.

Kassa first heard about Bitcoin in 2013, when his roommate was mining
it at Chapman University. But the idea did not click for him. He spent
years thinking bitcoin was just some kind of alternative and
speculative investment. He said his penny drop moment actually came
when he was at the airport in Addis last summer. As he was boarding
the plane, he stood and wondered: If I had my wealth stored in gold or
cattle, how could I take it across a border?

Today, Kassa has created Telegram groups where he pays freelancers,
graphic designers and translators based in Ethiopia with bitcoin. In
America, he said, most people treat bitcoin as an investment or as a
savings account. But he is using it as a medium of exchange and
payment too. It is easier and cheaper, and now a part of his life.

Kassa is focused on the Lightning Network, and uses it to pay his
contacts in Ethiopia. He helps them set up the open-source, free Blue
Wallet, and pays them directly with Lightning. He is amazed at how
easy it is, and how it transmits hard value instantly halfway across
the world.

On the other end, his contacts use Blue Wallet as their savings
accounts, and they exchange locally into birr when they need to in
peer-to-peer markets. This is, he said, hugely preferable to Western
Union and birr-denominated accounts, where, for example, on a recent
payment, Kassa had to pay $13 to send $100. When Kassa pays his
colleagues, he pays them the full amount, rather than paying through
the government exchange rate where authorities steal a portion. His
contacts are their own banks, and no one can debase or remotely
confiscate their funds. This, Kassa said, is a revolution.

Kassa does have concerns and fears about Bitcoin. For example, the
Ethiopian government is hyper-concerned about satellite internet. If
citizens are caught with satellite equipment, for example, they can go
to prison. In this context, he is worried about the safety of people
running their own Bitcoin nodes. He also thinks that many people may
end up using custodial services, since as of right now, many cannot
even tell the difference between bitcoin and other coins, and are far
away from understanding the difference between custodial and
non-custodial services. He is also cautious about all the new cheap
smartphones flooding in from ZTE and Huawei, all from China. He is
worried about people using these phones for Bitcoin hot wallets, as he
does not think they are safe. In addition, because the phone networks
are not reliable, people still carry cash in cities, even if they have
smartphones, as sometimes the service goes out.

Kassa said the biggest obstacle to Bitcoin adoption in Ethiopia might
be the false promise of alternative cryptocurrencies. In particular,
he has identified Cardano as a threat. In a recent video, the
currency’s creator spoke about working with the Ethiopian regime to
incorporate 5 million students onto the Cardano blockchain, and boasts
that then they could be tracked with metadata throughout their life
and career.

“Our vision and goals,” he said, “are directly in line with the goals
of the Ethiopian government.” In contrast, Kassa is glad that
Bitcoin’s goals are not in line with the aims of the thieves and
bureaucrats who run his country. He worried that many may fall prey to
schemes like Cardano.

As for Gates and Buffet: Kassa actually did get a chance to go to the
Berkshire Hathaway event in Lincoln, Nebraska a few years ago. It was
very powerful, he said, to see 40,000 people coming together as part
of a community. But, the event was very inward-looking, which explains
how Buffet and friends cannot see just how corrupt the world is around
them. They do not see the water that they swim in, and are seemingly
blind to the trillions of dollars of money laundered each year through
the banking system. For them to ignore the harms that the dollar
system has caused on the developing world, Kassa said, and instead
focus on the flaws of Bitcoin, is naive and self-serving. He is glad
that these investors are dinosaurs. They are not the future.

In contrast, 75% of the population of Ethiopia is under the age of 27.
Once they start using Bitcoin, Kassa thinks they will spread the
technology quickly to friends and family. Adoption will not take
decades, but years. When he moved back to Ethiopia in 2013, there were
about 5 million people online. Now, there are about 25 million. In the
next five years, he expects a majority of the population will be
connected, and for Bitcoin to follow.

As far as priorities, Kassa thinks spreading education is most
important. He is currently working on translating “The Little Bitcoin
Book” into Amharic. As far as he knows, there is no other Bitcoin
content translated as of yet into Ethiopia's three major languages.

When asked if he is worried about the government cracking down on
Bitcoin, he said that it will be hard to get in the middle of a
hard-working Ethiopian and a better life. The population is young,
agile, creative and adapting. It will not be stopped. People, he said,
are sick of poverty and earning money only to see it depreciate.

Today, Ethiopians are at war with each other. “We are fighting
ourselves,” Kassa said. “If we are willing to kill each other to solve
our problems, we will definitely be willing to try Bitcoin as an
alternative.” And that, he thinks, will be a peaceful revolution.

***

After reading the stories of Aderinokun, Mo and Kassa, and witnessing
how Bitcoin is so valuable to people outside of the dollar bubble,
compare this with what Munger, Buffet, Lagarde, Sachs and others say
about Bitcoin: that it is something with no social value. That it will
just get people’s hopes up, only to let them down.

“Disgusting”

“Rat poison”

“I would short it”

“Totally reprehensible”

For most people, it is the government that lets people down. It is the
government that is reprehensible. Liberation technologies should be
invested in, not shorted.

And for those comfortable in the dollar bubble? It’s time to check
your financial privilege.