SPEECH TITLE: Bitcoin Empowers Africa and Africans Empower Bitcoin
SPEAKER: Anita Posch
CONFERENCE: Baltic Honeybadger 2023
Table of Contents
Introduction: From Personal History to Bitcoin Advocacy
It’s great to be here. I’m here for the third time and the first time I was here was in 2019, and I was interviewing people like NVK, Jameson Lopp, Jan Čapek, and Pavel Sládek from Braiins. After quite some travel to the Global South and different countries, I want to bring you my learnings from these travels and my work there.
I also want to welcome all of you because I believe that each one of you has the power to change the world. Because it’s us, every single one of you, who will carry the torch of Financial Freedom forward. And so, you might ask: “Why did I start my whole travel and journey? Why did I leave my family, my friends, my home to travel the world and share my knowledge about Bitcoin with the people who I believe need it the most?”.
Well, my grandmother’s name was Nilichka. She came from Bohemia at the time when the kingdom of Bohemia was a part of the Austrian Empire. And as such, the countries had the same currency, the Crown. And the crown went into hyperinflation after the Austrian Empire fell apart. So that’s part of the history I got to know through my grandparents. And also, they told me a lot about the time when the Nazis came to Austria and the power structures suddenly changed and what happened to their Jewish friends and that they were listening to BBC Radio instead of the Nazi propaganda, which could have brought them into an Arbeitslager.
And on top of that, I’m a lesbian. So, for the first 30 years of my life, I was discriminated against by Austrian law, by rules set in place by human rulers. And these kinds of things, of course, made me question equality, fairness, and authority. And so, in 2017, when I heard the second time about Bitcoin because in 2011, I heard about it, but I dismissed it because I thought it’s just another PayPal and who needs that? I decided to put all my work and efforts into trying to learn about Bitcoin and also started my educational story or work in 2018 with my podcast.
Then I wrote (L)earn Bitcoin, a book for newbies and people who might still have their Bitcoin on exchanges. It’s mostly about self-custody, why we need Bitcoin, and how you secure it the best. One and a half years ago, I founded my non-profit initiative, Bitcoin for Fairness, with which I traveled to Ghana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, and spent the last 12 months in these Southern African countries to bring Bitcoin grassroots adoption and education to the people.
And now, two weeks ago, I started or launched my online learning and mentorship platform, Crack the Orange, which has several goals. One goal is to educate all newbies about Bitcoin with a focus on self-custody and privacy. And it’s also a scholarship program for aspiring educators from the global South, but more on that later.
The Power Dynamics of Currency and Inflation in Africa
In early 2020, I visited Zimbabwe the first time. It was just right before the pandemic hit and I just came home to Austria before the borders were closed, because I wanted to learn how the system is corrupt. Why is there so much inflation? From all the things I learned in these years, I want to tell you how I believe that Bitcoin empowers Africa.
If we take a look at the map of the world, we can see that 55% of the global population has to live under authoritarian rulers or in hybrid regimes. That’s the orange and red countries.
And you can see most of them are in Africa. And there is a correlation because also the wealth map shows this pattern from the Russian Federation down to the African region. The darkest red countries are the countries which are the poorest. And this is something that definitely goes hand in hand with these authoritarian regimes, because keeping the people poor is also a strategy for the autocrats and dictators to stay in power.
Because if your money loses value day by day, if you need every day to just hustle and to survive, you don’t have the time or the resources to educate yourself, to build resistance and to stand up to your dictator. And in the Bitcoin space, we are always talking about how a hard asset like Bitcoin is a solution for inflation, which is true. It is, but we don’t know how it really feels.
I mean, these years, we also have like 10% inflation in Austria now, so people experience themselves what it means. But it’s still something different in a country like Zimbabwe.
In the background of the bar graph is a typical Zimbabwean bread. Everyone is eating that. And in 2018, early 2019, it cost one US dollar. And over the last months, the packaging has gotten smaller, and the price skyrocketed.
Why? Because at the beginning of 2019, the Central Bank, basically the government, decided to reinvent the Zimbabwean dollar. And they said to the people who owned US dollar accounts in Zimbabwe, “Yeah, we will exchange your US dollars to Zimbabwean dollar. But no worries, it will stay the same value.” Of course, everyone knew that this is a lie because it was the second time in the last 20, 30 years that that happened.
So, this bread cost one US dollar, one Zimbabwean dollar at the beginning of 2019. When I came the first time to Zimbabwe, it cost 28. So just imagine you have money on your bank account, and a year later, it’s divided by 28. In January this year, it was one US dollar to 850 Zimbabwean dollars. And from April to May, that’s the last column, it skyrocketed. At the moment one US dollar is about four 4500 Zimbabwean dollars.
Bitcoin’s Role in Economic Empowerment and Independence
Bitcoin is a solution to many problems for the people that they are facing. And that’s also a reason why many African countries try to ban Bitcoin. Of course, they will not be able to really ban it, but they try.
If the people of Zimbabwe and other African countries were to start using Bitcoin more than their national currency, they basically could try out their dictators because that inflation system is the system how they keep themselves in place. There’s a story from Zimbabwe, and I know it’s true because I heard it from someone very high ranking.
The central bank is basically printing money, and then they engage runners, that are people who are going to the countryside, to the small villages, to sell the Zimbabwean dollar to the people for their US dollars, because they need the Zimbabwe dollar to pay for their children’s school fees because it’s legal tender. And that’s how they steal from the people.
Another opportunity for African countries to gain more independence is Bitcoin mining. Gridless is an example of how it can be done. Many African countries have vast resources, also hydropower, and instead of selling out their rare earths, their minerals, their gold, and indebting themselves with Western countries and China, they could start mining Bitcoin and also stabilize their solar power grid and power grid in general.
Banking fees in South Africa are higher than in Germany. So, people don’t use banks. They don’t trust banks. Banks are slow, they are bureaucratic, and very often close your account or say, “Sorry, we have a limit of daily transactions or monthly transactions. You can only send a hundred dollars a month.” And so, I know people in Zimbabwe who have unbanked themselves, and they are now using Bitcoin and when they need US dollars, they exchange it peer-to-peer.
Bitcoin’s Impact on African Sociopolitical Movements
Bitcoin enforces freedom of speech and also freedom of association. And this example is from Nigeria. Nigeria, during the End SARS protests, the Nigerian Feminist Coalition supported that demonstration with donations, which they got into their bank accounts. And when the Central Bank shut down the bank account, they remembered that there’s something called Bitcoin, installed a BTC pay server, received donations in bitcoin, and were able to support the demonstrations.
But this, of course, is only possible if you use your bitcoin in self-custody, if you have the keys to your bitcoin, sadly, most Africans have their coins on Binance, for instance. So that’s, of course, censorable. This is also a magic number; twenty is the median age of African people. Whereas 43 is the median age in Europe and about the same in the US.
Where do you think people will adopt new technologies more? In a country or in countries where the need is higher, where the people are younger, they are more encouraged to use new technologies in the face of the problems that they have? It’s a no-brainer for me that they will do.
And how is it the other way around? How do Africans empower Bitcoin? At the moment, that’s a graph from Bitrefill, you can see that the cryptocurrency economy on the African continent compared to its size and to the population, to the number of the people there, is lower than other continents.
Most transactions in African countries are done peer-to-peer without KYC, which is great for privacy and for financial inclusion. I also think it’s great for us because there will always be a market for non-KYC Bitcoin with tighter regulations. They are starting now, and they will also try to regulate Bitcoin in Africa, and they will succeed with many people, but there will still be this market.
And so, what I have observed is that Bitcoin in the northern countries is more used as a store of value because we can afford to save money. People in the global South can’t. For them, also because of the restrictions they have, it’s more a medium of exchange. And the great thing about Bitcoin is it can do both. It’s a store of value and also a medium of exchange, even more with the Lightning Network and new layer 2, layer 3 technologies that we are seeing that will be coming.
So, the north needs the south, the south needs the north, and we are one. Bitcoin is a global currency. It connects us. It’s a unifier in that sense, which I think is great.
This is a map. Some of you might have seen it yesterday from African Bitcoiners, which is also an educational community. And when I came first to Zimbabwe in 2020, I only heard about Botswana, the Satoshi Center from Alakanani Itireleng. It was the first education center about Bitcoin that I have heard of, and I visited her. And now you can see how the ecosystem has grown. Now we have Bitcoin Cowries in Ghana, Bitcoin Dada in Kenya, Bitcoin for Fairness in Zambia, the Bitcoin Innovation Hub in Kampala, Uganda, which was opened yesterday, and that’s a picture from Bitcoin Ekasi in South Africa.
And one by one, people in Africa will learn how Bitcoin can help them, how it can empower them, even when there is no internet. You might think, how should that work without internet? Well, there’s a young South African guy, he developed a solution for phones, regular phones like the old Nokia ones. Many people only have those phones, but and they have access to sending text messages. And that’s a system that in many countries, they are already using.
You might have heard from M-Pesa in Kenya, mobile money. In Zimbabwe, it’s called EcoCash. You get a text menu on your screen and you by pressing numbers, you can navigate through the menu. And that’s the way how you can send lightning bitcoin in seven or eight African countries at the moment.
The Need for Sustainable Education and Development in the Bitcoin Ecosystem
So what you also can see is that it’s important that we have developers in Africa from Africa who know about the problems on the ground and who will build resilient software solutions, solutions for using Bitcoin in these countries where they are facing dictators. And so they need to build for their worst case. And Qala is one of the programs who are supporting and educating African developers.
And what I have learned from my work on the ground is that; the workshops I gave with Bitcoin for Fairness, the communities we started, that’s all great to build trust. That’s the most important thing at the beginning because everyone has been scammed or knows someone who has been scammed. They know what Bitcoin is in that sense, Bitcoin is something to make money fast.
And so I always start at that point. Yes, it’s legit. No, it’s not a scam. Yes, you got this WhatsApp message and yes, that’s a scam. But this is different, let me tell you how. So it’s great to onboard people. But then in a dynamic environment like Bitcoin is with new wallets coming out all the time, I think you also need to build sustainable educational possibilities. And that’s why I started Cracked the Orange, where the main goal is to offer scholarships to aspiring Bitcoin educators and community builders in the global South who otherwise would not be able to afford this kind of education. In a sense, it’s what Qala is doing.
The goal is that some people, even from my education, then can become developers. It’s an online course that you also can gift to your friends or family and at the same time, the people who are in the scholarship will earn a certificate of completion at the end. They can also do their certified Bitcoin professional exam, which gives you a professional certificate that proves your knowledge.
And my idea is that they can then take this certificate and apply for a job globally in the Bitcoin space. Bitcoin is not there yet, let’s say it like that. The communities are growing, the need is growing and the need is there, but what we need is more privacy to protect individuals and human rights activists against surveillance and scalable solutions to scale Bitcoin so that the first billions of people can use it.
I’m simply not enough to do that so maybe one of you wants to educate your peers, like become a podcaster, become an educator. Bitcoin doesn’t have a marketing department; we all have to do it and if this is not something that you want to do, I’ll ask you to please support the work we do.
Support Cracked the Orange either you join a membership or you gift a course to your friends and family or you can donate to the scholarships we’re doing and you will find all the possibilities at anita.link/donate. I’m now at the book Booth outside so if someone wants to buy a signed book and chat with me, I’m there and thank you very much.
Twitter: @AnitaPosch
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