My friend Tawanda and Verangai have been preaching about bitcoin from 2014. Tawanda actually opened a wallet for me and sent me coffee worth $4 so i could start investing and trading. I never took it seriously until sometime back when i was interested in investing.
Where i come from, we invest in stocks, pyramid schemes, land and in businesses. Bitcoin has only been in blogs and not in our classrooms where we need to reach young people how to diversify their investments. We actually don't know that there are more crypto currencies than bitcoin out there.
So i decided to invest in bitcoin and the frustrations i went though really convinced me that they were never created for Africans.
i was advised to register with a local entity. in my case, it was Bitpesa. The registration process was easy, i just had to load my ID and my contact. The guys at Bitpesa take 15 days to verify your information so you can start trading. They are worse than the Government which takes 3 days. Do they know what happens to the prices of virtual currency in 15 days?
i was then asked to download Mycelium, which s one of the most secure places to trade bitcoins. It also connects you to other bitcoin traders in your area. Unfortunately, they do not accept credit cards from Africa. i can download the app from Africa, but i cannot trade with it in Africa. What is the point then?
Mycelium went ahead and suggested other traders i could buy from. From the app, i could buy a bitcoin for $3000. other traders in my vicinity, which is as far as Zimbabwe (i live in Kenya) were selling to me at almost $4800. How is that helping me and my investment?
I was then advised to ask someone in the US to buy the bitcoins and then transfer to me. Well, this was finally about to make sense. Using paypal or bank transfer, i would lose upto $100 in transfer charges.
Well, All this happened in a span of 5 days where the currency went higher and higher. So i kept wondering, why is it so hard to trade bitcoins in Africa? Was this even made with Africans in mind?
Well, lets see how the next one month will go.
Lol @ pyramid schemes.
Check out local Bitcoin. You'll be able to buy and sell from them too and transfer to your wallet.
I also registered with bitpesa. When I found it was taking long, used local Bitcoin and it was pretty smooth. Mine was to get some ethereum. Did a small amount first.
I would like to give you some little advice on this subject. I discovered bitcoin in early 2014, dissmissed it like swine flu. Then I though it was an investment opportunity since I wanted to get rich quick. After losing some money on the dips, I decided to read, inform myself, gather info.
its been 3 years and I havent finished educating myself. This space evovles to quickly, and the best investment I ever made is educating myself about the distributed ledger tech. I have never invested my hard earned cash again because I was missing the point. Once you realise the whole intention of decentralization using blockchain tech you will be mind blown! currency is just the first app. There is so much more we can achieve using this tech.
You will sit down and realise the flaws we have in our moneytary policies, governance models, currency wars, Whats threatening global economic inclusion etc etc. ..and so much more.
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