Topic: Out of control and rising: why bitcoin has Nigeria’s government in a panic (Read 240 times)

It’s clear that the government of Nigeria never understood cryptocurrency, especially bitcoin. They thought that banning it was going to do them any good, but it wasn’t. Banning cryptocurrencies never stopped Nigerians from making use of it, immediately it got banned, they all switched to making use of p2p platforms such as Binance P2P and Paxful.

Platforms like three saw major increase in their number of new users. Why this is a loss for the government is because they have ended up banning centralized exchanges and that means there wouldn’t be a way for them to keep track of cryptocurrency users, even if they wanted to, since centralized exchange were there the only way the government controls cryptocurrency. And they are also not going to be receiving taxes any longer from these platforms, so it’s kind of a loss for them.

Given how the restricting measures didn't impact the trading volume seriously, I think it's safe to assume that the crypto community there is very strong, and they aren't afraid of the government. It's great news because Nigeria is under authoritarian regime (according to Democracy index), but people are clearly fighting it nevertheless. Also, given that the attitude towards cryptos is inconsistent and depending on various authorities there are different intentions, I hope the market will get favorably regulated there after all.
I knew Nigeria's a country where people are no strangers to cryptos, but I also had no idea it was #2 after the US by trading volume. I checked a couple of sources, and it seems more or less correct. Nigeria is #3, according to Statista, with Russia being #2 (didn't know that either), but they're pretty close, so it's reasonable to assume that it can vary depending on the estimates and on timing.

Valid point.

Dictatorial countries will really cause a big problem to the cryptocurrency's nature because we all know that dictatorship requires being under the surveillance of the government in any way possible. Everything is under the hands of the government to decide what will happen, how it should behave, and how it will be offered to the citizens. With this, strict regulation of cryptocurrency will surely take place under a dictatorial regime. This will just nullify the decentralized nature of crypto.

On the other hand, I also agree that aside from the dictatorial regime, other forms of government can also have a big impact on crypto. If the government cannot handle financial responsibility well, they would opt to be on either side of the coin. Whichever is convenient and fit for their interests, they would side on it. In this instance, the government of Nigeria decided to ban it last February despite it being second in trading overall. In this case, maybe the government of Nigeria is trying to control something. They want to regulate crypto or their want to tax it to get something from it, hence, the act of banning it to let the citizen know they need to impose something in exchange for something.

The Nigerian government should have been grateful it's citizens are getting involved in crypto, from a report I saw sometime ago about Nigeria! So many students graduating yearly but yet no job for them and this makes most individuals feel going to university is worthless, since no jobs most of it's citizens get involved with bitcoin and it's activities thereby being self employed and also financially stable, this process slowly eradicates poverty but instead of the government to appreciate this they are being bitter.

Nigerian government and lame excuse has been in existence and its not stopping anytime soon because it's always embedded in the politicians DNA.
Nigerians Government or rather I should say old men with  stone age knowledge who always want to rule the affairs of economic with high taste in corruption. It's in the blood and its always difficult to remove from the system.
Crypto on the other hand, it has came to liberate the youth who are trying to fed for them selfs but Nigeria government will always be against something they can't override. Bunch of old rokuns.

Not only the Nigerian government. Most of the developing country government had start a primitive steps.Because the people involved us not going to do pay of taxes.We know developing country need of some taxes to run smoothly. This is cause of the statement made by the Nigerian government.

Rather than dictatorial regimes, I would say that regimes that are financially irresponsible have basically a fight or flight reaction to bitcoin. They either try to embrace it and corrupt it for their own goals or they try to ban it altogether - finding out that it is nearly impossible by design to do so. On the famous examples of countries that tried to pervert crypto for their own goals is, as it could not be otherwise, Venezuelan and ignominious "Petro". It does not get more shady than that does it?

I honestly think that crypto will face a lot of trouble from the dictatorial regimes, they are the ones who are losing the most out of these stuff, think about it decentralization in a dictatorship? Of course, it is going to be a big trouble. That is also why China keeps banning bitcoin as well, they just do not like it when others have the power, they need to control the whole nation 100% without a single doubt, if they don't, then the whole domino crumbles all together.

So, Nigeria who is a mismanaged nation that has so many problems that even the greatest person in the world can't fix in under a decade (could help get it better though), it is normal that people would look elsewhere, there is no more "hope" left for them because like I said even the best person can't do it now, and politicians are rarely the best people, we vote for people who we do not hate compared to their opponents we hate, it is valid in every nation for every party. Going away from that and putting your money into crypto is a smart move.

this is an interesting thing when it immediately becomes second in bitcoin trading, when they are aggressively banning it
but indeed there are some people who have predicted this will happen and actually there is something funny about this Nigerian case which I remember very well when in February the Central Bank of Nigeria ordered all banks and financial institutions to immediately close accounts found transacting with Bitcoin and currency. other cryptocurrencies, but on the other hand, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, is optimistic that his country will legalize transactions using Bitcoin because he sees its citizens still using bitcoin.
and I think this is a blunder and is like a wishy-washy decision that makes its citizens do things as usual and will definitely not follow the applicable rules.
because they (the people) believe that they adopt crypto, especially bitcoin, they indirectly want to save themselves each to achieve future success, even bans are allowed because this is actually the nature of all citizens where the more people are banned, the more they get banned. want to do it

Bitcoin is slowly becoming the de facto currency of the last resort. I don't understand the skeptic's belief that a currency should be government-issued/sanctioned. I think when most of the world that is involved in crypto believe that BTC has value, it does have value.

I second that as well, but the thing is I'm pretty sure the Nigerian government being incompetent as they have always been are yet to fully do their research to understand Bitcoin and why it's so popular in Nigeria. The Nigerian government are only concerned with the negative information that the media has to say about Bitcoin every now and then, and they have acted on that to issue their own kind of ban on the currency. Having said that, I think the Nigerian government are renowned for "firing at the wrong target", if you live in Nigeria you'd understand exactly what I'm talking about, the situation on ground is pretty bad, instead of working on improving the Nigerian economic situation and other whatnots, the government still goes after things that a fair amount of it's citizens are enthused about, and making a little pocket money out of. The ban is an easy one to bypass though, and I was very sure Nigerians would bypass it, I just hope this doesn't move the government to issue an outright ban on crypto.

The Nigerian Naira has definitely "seen better days", it is presently experiencing severe inflation, I'm not saying Bitcoin should be used in the place of the Naira, but the Nigerian government should freely allow Nigerians to decide the currency they want to use, Naira, Bitcoin or both.

Based on the article you shared, I carefully finished reading it so that there are no mistakes in drawing conclusions.

The points that I get in terms of a more fundamental aspect are that some Nigerian policies are not fully accepted by society, especially among young people. Demonstrators sparked various perspectives as they received an extraordinary amount of cryptocurrency donations for a donation.

Furthermore, the point that I don't forget to get is where the Nigerian government actually began to try to change its direction so that the community supports crypto which the government deliberately made almost exactly the implementation system, maybe this is more of a centralized nature so that it can still control large expenditures easily detected because it has been designed under government control.

I found that several countries listed in the article, such as Turkey, Egypt, Ghana, and many others, were actually conducting surveillance on crypto trade which led to money laundering on a large scale so that the bank was forced to pressure the government to stop the disbursement of crypto money because make the value of each inflation increase significantly.

Based on the case that we have not found a clear point between the opposition and the Nigerian regime, it will continue if they do not provide benefits to all parties. This triggers various views of other countries on Nigeria's reputation in the eyes of the world. Because like it or not, they remain in the spotlight, which dominates the population among the largest young generation after the US.

Not really, I've already saw a topic like that, and this is the explanation for this surprising revelation:


So, you see, from the number two in the world it goes down to 60 coins a day, 2.4 million in $ a day. See how easy is to make some news look credible just by forgetting to mention a few words or numbers and combine data when it suits you?


This paragraph is purposely constructed this way, they talk about Nigeria getting in second place on Paxful, but then they don't mention the volume on Paxful but rather than that the volume of crypto movements between wallets so it would look better. Another one of those articles where 180% of the population owns crypto.

I think Nigeria's also the biggest contributor in crypto in the African continetn so I am really confused as to why and how are the government so stupid regarding this ban because it doesn't help them in anyway and it only makes them less popular to their citizens. I hope that their narrative towards bitcoin change in the future.

The article is quite a long one but I tried my best to read it as it concerns my Country. I heard about the ban in February and I got a lot of calls and text messages from people who knew I was into it but I wasn't disturbed a bit because I know there are many ways to the trading aspect which can't be ban. I think I first read that Nigeria was ranked 2nd trading last year which came as a surprise to me then but not now anymore.

The media in Nigeria in this case of bitcoin issues have been very supporting and making a positive report about bitcoin and cryptocurrency (and they should because cryptocreency doesn't have any business with individual country or persons). The media has continue to do a positive review of the situation and bitcoin. Almost all radio stations and televisions have reported about bitcoin in their daily business news, also federal government stations.

The government will eventually turnaround and come to true realization about cryptocreency because they have not succeeded to stop anything about bitcoin in Nigeria. At the highest cadre, the officials who are internet savvy are dealing with bitcoin.

Moreover, soon twitter is going to come back to operate in Nigeria and you can see that all are just threat against modern system. They can keep threatening but won't have any hold against the threat they made.. It was on the news today that twitter will soon be back in Nigeria.

Nigeria independence was in 1960, Naira was equals to Pounds, higher in price than US dollar. US dollar was and is depreciating also through governmental control, but Nigerian Naira more depreciated. In 2014, 1 USD equals 169 Naira. But, in 2021, 1 USD equals $410.

One of the opposition leaders that contested against the incumbent president was against the CBN move, also the present vice president adviced CBN againsting the ban. Also are many other leaders that against the CBN move, even the Nigerian SEC only want cryptocurrencies to be regulated, not ban, and put on media how they are dialoguing with the CBN but I believe the negotiation was not successful. But the CBN governor that said cryptocurrencies are not legitimate money had no option again than to say the CBN did not say people should not trade cryptocurrencies, that only the bank transactions are not allowed. I believe all these move later make Nigerians to trade cryptocurrencies more and more because some people just like positive news. Even normally, CBN can not have control over cryptocurrencies which many people do not know.

The present Nigerian government are full of surprises in a way to inconvenient citizens, they like to deprive citizens of there rights, they proposed hate speech bill which was effective some years ago. They ban Twitter because Twitter suspended the the president's account for 24 hours after deleting what the president tweeted about many years ago Biafra war in Nigeria because Biafra is agitating for seperation while also the Yorubas are agitating for seperation accepting it to be through referendum. The CBN stops support for Bureau de change, the present government are full of surprises.

I was surprised when I read the news last year that Nigeria was the second highest in crypto trading volume, but yet the trading volume is getting stronger after the ban. Although, no bill to ban crypto, only the Central Bank of Nigeria ban crypto while P2P as been the alternative which is even better.

Nigeria with bad economy, no good leadership, the politicians making everything worse, if they are sick, they will fly to England, USA or India, there children are citizens of USA or England because they were given birth to there, they make their children to school abroad. But they make schools, hospitals and other sectors poor in their own country. The leaders are not good examples, the basic is to make export more than import, but they do not know what they can do to make this possible, lack of knowledge and intelligence. Nigeria is the highest oil (petroleum) producer in Africa, but the refined oils we are using in the country are imported into the country from our own export because they have dead refineries. I hope Dangote refinery will be promising, yet not from the government. I was not surprised when Trump called Africa nations as shitholes because the leaders way of governance is shitty.

The growing awareness of individuals and middle-income people is the best so far, because most of them work hard to collect money, and then inflation (illegal taxes) consumes most of this money.
Bitcoin may not be a perfect solution to this problem, but in theory it is the best of all these central alternatives.

Do not forget that most people in Africa do not have access to Internet or banking services, and therefore most of them will benefit from the ease of obtaining cryptocurrencies.

Nigeria has been breaking crypto records this past month as more than $40 million P2P bitcoin trades were made in period of month only which is highest as per report.The bitcoin search trends also show that Nigeria is topping the charts as more and more people are becoming interested in cryptocurrencies which is being indicated by the charts below as per Google's region trends also:


Nigeria exchanges have witnessed increase of crypto users this year and mostly or 32% population uses bitcoin among the country.The banks and other central entities cannot hamper the bitcoin growth in Nigeria and we will see boom soon.

Bitcoin can get rid of government control.

• It is limited in quantity and scarce, and will not increase its issuance.
• It can conduct transactions in countries around the world without permission by using Bitcoin.
• Because it runs in a secure network system, as long as you don't reveal your key, no one will seize the wealth.

Authoritarian governments like Nigeria do not believe in freedom, so they try to manipulate and control Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
When people in Nigeria sought financial freedom through Bitcoin, the government gradually realized the reality that cryptocurrency could not be effectively prevented, and the government would lose control of money. When the government no longer has the ability to obtain more benefits, all governments will panic.