I’m going to put it out there, cryptocurrencies – the paperless and nation-less currency traded on the borderless internet – could potentially tear apart traditional currency transfer companies and help cure poverty.
Accessing the multibillion-dollar remittance flows to Africa certainly has substantial appeal, perhaps helping to attract some large seed investments in African bitcoin startups.
Companies have sought to bring in individuals to bitcoin by strategically pricing themselves below the larger costs of international transfers. Some investors claim it could leapfrog traditional means of transferring wealth on a continent where two-thirds of people are “unbanked”.
Certain areas of Africa have already implemented ways of which to develop mobile money payment systems that give the unbanked population the opportunity to transition into the formal economy. Backers of bitcoin in Africa say they would take this a step further, however there is currently a road block slowing progress and that is the fact that more than three-quarters of Africans still don’t have an internet connection readily available.
Minor collections of individuals – mainly in countries like, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria – trade cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Steem via online forex sites, as they would any other asset or through crypto trading platforms such as Bitshare.
One of the biggest opportunities for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would be online payments, but I’ve also seen people using online wallets, using it for betting on sporting events online.
Actually being able to spend bitcoin in the region has proven to be more difficult. South Africa’s biggest retailer online, Bidorbuy, introduced bitcoin payments on its site quite recently; a small group of various online stores, mainly in South Africa, are already accepting the cryptocurrency. Most of the time, an exchange company delivers the back-end of the transfer, while local and online merchants quote prices in the local currency.
A leader of the crypto movement in Africa, Nii Quaynor (often coined as the “father of the internet” in Africa) is hopeful about the possibilities for blockchain technologies and says that voting practices and non-financial applications could be transform the economic landscape.
Bitcoin maintains an almost cult-like position across the globe and there has been early excitement about cryptocurrency, most of all as an affordable way for individuals to transfer wealth, but this has subsided as a result of the high fluctuation in price, uncertainty around anonymity and just how secure their wallets are, not to mention the initial barrier in understanding the som etimes complex system. As the adoption of bitcoin increases, some nations, political establishments and central banks are looking at the possibility of regulating the sector, which some users think will build confidence in cryptocurrencies while others worry that regulation would make it harder to carry out transactions.
In the meantime, global crypto fans are set to keep on trading.
What do you think the future holds for cryptocurrencies?
It just so happens someone who I follow posted in a similar vein recently:
https://steemit.com/steem/@matrixdweller/steem-is-better-for-the-worlds-poor-than-bitcoin
The way that Steem also permits those in africa lucky enough to be literate also means that there is a direct opportunity for earning for these people. But if steem adoption continues to grow, as it is, the market cap will grow and this will give more scope for more developments funded by Steem itself, and the implementation of solutions for the world's poor. Steem I think represents the first cryptocurrency that has a shot at cracking this problem for the people in Africa, South America and Southern Asia.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, I personally see all the signs that flaws in its architecture are destroying its value and much of what flows out of bitcoin will flow where it is being better used. This is going to be in part Steem as well. I would be interested in seeing charts on the growth of the entire cryptocurrency market capitalisation, I am sure that soon we will see as bitcoin cools down, Dash, Steem, the upcoming zCash, and Ethereum advance faster and continue the growth of the amount of economic activity denominated in cryptocurrencies.
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