Topic: Why I invested in bitcoin - page 2. (Read 7296 times)

You confuse money with wealth. Yes they dont have money because their currency is crap, but they have wealth, every single able bodied african can create a product or a service that can be sold to bitcoin.

Bitcoin value is not going up just because USD and EUR as injected into it, it can also go up if products are denominated in BTC and sold in it.

How many slave factories are there in africa where they pay them 10 cent/hour? You know those poor people could do just the same on their own, and get paid in Bitcoins, futhermore they keep all the profits and not share any of it with their slavemaster employers.

I dont know they could just grow vegetables and fruits and sell them inbetween eachother, that could also grow the BTC market cap, it doesnt necesarly have to be FOREX injection.

Wealth is the one that drives up prices not money, the fiat currencies are also a representation of wealth. Just as labour, and other work, can create wealth.


Have you ever heard of batteries ? Its a great invetion, it makes electricity portable, google it if you dont know what it is.

The USD is in a huge ponzi scheme debt bubble, its days of being a reserve currency are numbered, people will need some alternatives, besides USD transaction comissions are huge, i dont think that poor africans enjoy 10-20 $ comisions, when their daily wage is less than the comission they have to pay.

So yes BTC is better for poor people.


Yeah like the authorities there will care, they can only seize what they see, sure they can seize banks and other stuff there ,but BTC is more underground, unless they go house to house and check everyone's phone i highly doubt it.


Who said that it has to contain the blockchain? Just like smartphones do, you create an online wallet and you only need internet.

Well for older phones you could use the sms technology to send tokens that will validate the transactions, but all BTC will be stored in some online wallet.

If Bitpesa could collaborate with Blockchain.com or Coinbase.com and create an API for SMS transactions then it could work very easily.

More obstacles, Kenyan currency is only available in Kenya but BTC could be available in all Africa.

Let me see if I got the reasoning right.

1) The value of Bitcoin will be driven to huge new highs because Bitcoin will be embraced by all those millions of poor people in Africa. Who don't have any money to begin with. Yeah, right. They will drive the price of Bitcoin up with their bids. That's the ticket.

2) They don't have any electricity - but they do have mobile phones. Must be some model mobile phones from an alternate reality - mobile phones that work with coal and steam.

3) Their own currency is unstable and inflating, so they will switch to Bitcoin. And not to US dollars, for instance, which are orders of magnitude more stable. Sure thing.

4) Oh, but they cannot switch to US dollars, because of the capital controls. Uh-huh, while switching to Bitcoin will be a breeze. Because the authorities there are stupid and will say "sure, go ahead, feel free to escape inflation and capital controls with Bitcoin, as long as it is not real currency like US dollars or euros". Personal disclosure: I still have some amount of money frozen in Iceland, which introduced capital controls after its economy (banks, really) crashed. Guess what, trading in Bitcoin (as well as in any  foreign currency) is prohibited there. (I think it is allowed to sell bitcoins that you have mined yourself but that's about it.) And Iceland is a free and democratic country with lots of protection of personal rights. Imagine how it would be under some tinpot dictatorship.

5) M-Pesa was successful because all you needed was an SMS-capable phone (and electricity for it, of course). Not a phone that is capable of doing SHA-256, RIPEM-160, ECC and other crap like that.

6) BitPesa doesn't let you send money to some poor African villager with no electricity. It lets you send bitcoins to one particular company, which promises to deliver Kenyan currency to the recipient of your choice. Tell me again about trustless money transfer with no need for a trusted third party. Still, Bitcoin is indeed suitable for the company that does this - since it allows cheap international money transfer to it. It is not suitable for sending money directly to the poor African villagers with no electricity.

You really ought to get out more. There is a real world out there, you know.

Not dissing Bitcoin or anything like that - it is a brilliant idea with a bright future. But the wide-eyed crazies promoting it as a solution to every world problem are really doing it a disservice. It is a mistake to try to impose it as money or a national currency or whatever. Where it really shines is as a payment method. The guys who started using it internally to allow cheap remittances for the Filipino workers in Hong Kong back home got it right. Bitcoin is suitable for them - not for the poor Filipino workers. Trying to get those workers to transact in Bitcoin would have been stupid and would have failed miserably.

M-pesa and the succesor Bit-pesa (with bitcoins) work with mobile phone SMS technology.

They dont need neither electricity or internet, and almost all africans already have some form of older mobile phones where they could use Bitpesa.

Read my previous post man.

Along with electricity, don't they also need an internet connection for bitcoin transactions ?

The way M-pesa worked, the same way bitcoin could.

Yes they dont have electricity and internet but almost everyone has mobile phones. Yes old Ericson R320, you remember that, well i`m pretty sure every african has access to those old phones.

They are not that trendy in the west anymore with all these smart phone BS propaganda, but the old phones are probalby worth 1-2$ and can be easily purchased by any african person.

They use M-pesa and other services from where you pay with your phone.

If there would be a service where you could do the same, but with bitcoin, then it would gain wider popularity amongs africans aswell.

Oh wait, there is: https://www.bitpesa.co/

Check that out, see, they already though about that. Bitcoins will become very popular in africa in the next years.

Of course offline wallets would be the better, but you are right in villager where is no electricity, its hard to operate an offline storage. But its still better than their local government money

A lot of villages in Africa are without electricity how are they gonna pay with bitcoin 
I think that for at least 5 years bitcoin won't be mainstream in Africa.

Nope, i think the African people will really drive up the Bitcoin's price.

There are many unfortunate people in africa, with crumbling economy and very inflated toiled paper money, the desperately need a stable currency and a decentralized one, with all that capital control BS that they have.

Yes a westerner might brag about 5% daily volatility of BTC, but i dont think that an African or a South American will brag about it, where they have 20-30 % inflation and huge volatility.

They would embrace anything onther than their own currency, so just spread the word in Africa and South America, and then you might see BTC to the Moon!

I have faith in those people, they really deserve a better currency!

While that is somewhat true, Bitcoin was a $1 at a time.  The thing that was driving it to increase was the amount of people gathering an interest.  I can assure you, a lot of people are here to try and get rich an don't give a hoot about what Bitcoin is or what it can do.  Once the value is no longer worth it, people will leave.

Those who truely believe in the currency aspect of bitcoin will remain if bitcoin goes to dollar parity of $1.

It is only then that it will really act as a currency.

Just hedge between other crypto's, you can still keep your purchasing power intact and not lose money, but atleast your wealth remains in the crypto world. By exchanging it into fiat money you are comitting treason against the Gods of the Blockchain

It better if the money just flows between 1 crypto and the other, than to flow out and go back to fiat.

I feel ya. But it is hard to believe in bitcoin when price is dropping every day.

Don't

Just trade between altcoins BTC/LTC and others, never exchange it back into fiat, maybe a small amount only if that is your income.

Do good for the community and dont devaluate bitcoins please

I've invested a large portion of my money into bitcoin and been trading half of them since then. But each time I sell btc for fiat I feel like I'm doing the most stupid thing in the universe

I've Invested in bitcoin a few different times and for a few different reasons , I do now that only one time I was scammed out of my bitcoins and all other transactions went smoothly and I love it I just wish I could have got into mining them back in the day , I am trying to Get a start-up going here in Canada and acceapt and run my bussines around bitcoin Maybe Somehow i can get funding to start up and buy a few ASIC's to start but I keep reading its failing so it makes it hard for a young fella , To want to get to heavily involved i guess,,.

While that is true, Bitcoins will not remain if the Cash value goes down to nothing, we would lose at least 70% of our current users and we would not get any newcomers.

What do you mean rebuild themselves? Tell people not to fixate on the current price but it's potential value in the future. Bitcoin is more than just a currency it's an entire network that many industries and companies can benefit from using.