Author

Topic: Cheaper adoption for the unbanked (Read 140 times)

newbie
Activity: 4
Merit: 0
November 12, 2017, 12:58:48 PM
#1
Hi guys, I live in South Africa and am extremely frustrated by the difficulty and expense to get Bitcoin adopted in the African continent. Most people in South Africa - which is the richest country in the 54 Country - Continent cannot afford to mine bitcoins and the majority have not even hared about Bitcoin yet. Very few are able to afford mining equipment so the majority of those like me who are new to bitcoin have to buy bitcoin from exchanges. Now the problem is that it costs ten thousand rands (R10000) more to buy a bitcoin in South Africa than it does in international exchanges. This is is $695 that is more than the price of two ETH or DASH tokens just to buy one BTC. This is not right and cannot be allowed to continue. The cheapest international exchange that allows South Africans to buy BTC using VISA/Mastercard is CEX.io where the fees are also high costing upwards of $100 just to deposit FIAT currency. Now that is almost R1300 a substantial amount of money for many South African families - actually this is the legal minimum wage per month. Other platforms like Localbitcoins are also equally expensive as people are trading BTC for a profit and use even more expensive chanels like Paypal, MoneyGram and TransUnion. Fellow crypto community what can be done to solve this problem and make the adoption of BTC cheaper for people in Africa? I know that BTC is even significantly more expensive to acquire in other African countries. 
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