⌚︎ @5atoshiNakamoto

Smartphone adoption is growing rapidly in the capital city of Lusaka where 4G cell signal is strong. (I'd be happy to connect you with friends down in the capital who can better speak to that growth and their ₿itcoin efforts.) However, in the rural village 13 hours north where I've lived since 2018, smartphones are still few and far between in 2023. Heck, running water and electricity are absent here. Solar panels, if at all, are typically small, 10-20 watts, yet still rare, but suitable for charging simple phones. Cell signal is improving, but still most often displays as "E" (the Edge network, like 2G), or I can go stand on a particular hill for spotty "H" (3G). Some larger towns are beginning to see 4G more often. No 5G or StarLink out here as of yet.

Mobile money use on old-school feature phones is not uncommon, though cash remains dominant, hands-down. Still, people are familiar with the mobile money concept as these are the very people among the 2 billion unbanked and unserved by high bank fees, thus the Lightning Network has tremendous potential throughout sub-saharan Africa. And though it is custodial, still Machankura's SMS text-messaging ₿itcoin wallet, working without Internet, is an absolute game-changer for its practicality in introducing rural Zambians to ₿itcoin and the Lightning Network! ⚡

Appallingly, in just these 5 short years, Zambians have lost 50% of their purchasing power (measured in $USD) as the exchange rate has inflated 100% from ~10 -> ~20 kwacha/dollar. Cooking oil and transport fuel are the two hardest hit and most noticed expenses for the typical rural Zambian. Notably, many women at my local market no longer accept 5 ngwee coins ($0.0025) even where a common transaction might be 1 kwacha ($0.05), so might we say this is proportional to not accepting nickels for a one dollar sale? Interesting...Well, hold on a second. Proportional, yes, but equal, maybe not. In the US, it wouldn't be far off to hear, "you can't buy much for $1 these days," whereas here, I don't know that, "te kuti ukushita saana na umo kwacha" ("you can't buy much for 1 kwacha") is as common a refrain...in fact, my experience says otherwise. So maybe the denial of the 5 ngwee coin makes less sense still than not accepting nickels in the US would. Is it an unfair comparison?

Anyway, that reminds me, may I rant about Cost of Living for a moment? I'm assuming you've seen those longer-than-normal TV commericals with sad violin music for charities that show "oh those poor black children" with flies on their faces, guilefully attempting to guilt you for a generous monthly contribution, talking about the tremendous number of people around the world who survive on just one dollar a day. Can you believe it?! I agree, $1 a day sounds terrible and people absolutely should have more to live well on. Same page. However, I would remind viewers not to forget that they're not talking about living on $1 a day in the United States, so perhaps we might first consider just how far a dollar a day actually goes in such places. What these poverty-porn non-profits want you to forget about, in exchange for your branded t-shirt or hat, is that Cost of Living is relative, particularly in the most rural places like where I am with, yes, grass-thatched roofs, no running water, and no electrical grid. However, I do concede that even in relatively closed circular economies like this rural Zambian village where people grow their food, the increasing price of goods produced externally does hurt, mainly fuel. And so, the response should not be that they ought to continue to just live isolated from global trade. Thus, a dollar a day is still absurd and people deserve better. Yes, and I just have to say, out here, I can live on a dollar a day too. I have, I do. I can buy a lot of fresh vegetables and more at the local market for a day's dollar. $4 can make rather healthy meals for a week.
The problem isn't the nominal value of $1; the problem is the money itself.
And white saviorism with its cotton tote bag of overhead isn't helping. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

This has been written and talked about extensively, so I'll try to sum this up as simply as I might.

Bitcoin is not NEW. It's not 14 years old (in 2023). Bitcoin is the child of decades of research (back to the '40s and WWII if not earlier) in fields mixing programming and computers, cryptography and security, finance, economics, and monetary policy, the Internet itself, politics, game theory, and I'm sure even more. Bitcoin solved a very real problem in computer programming: the double-spend problem (which I won't go into here, but do look it up if unfamiliar). So it's not surprising that when you have something that is as revolutionary as Bitcoin seems to be, AND when that revolution is in a field as enticing to many as money itself, it would seem only natural that, like flies to light, you're going to get scammers attracted to this field. And that's what we have. Scams are everywhere in this space, so we must be mindful.

There are over 20,000 cryptocurrencies. Why? Well, open-source code (an auditing strength) can easily be forked (copied). So what gives Bitcoin's code actual value over any of the others?

Consensus-programmed digital scarcity and D E C E N T R A L I Z A T I O N

What? Alright, let's get to the meat of it. What is a blockchain?

Simply, a blockchain is just a digital ledger. A ledger creating a long record of every transaction that has ever occured. This is highly inefficient. In fact, it's so inefficient that you would never choose to use a blockchain unless the security created by the redundancy of the network's decentralization was your primary variable of concern.

Existing ways of transferring money (PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, etc.) are already much more efficient than using a blockchain. The thing is, when you use these services, no money is actually moving in the world. These companies are simply updating their own internal company Excel spreadsheet. Whereas Bitcoin is a cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer, cash-bearer instrument itself that moves and settles in 10 minutes on-chain (vs 4-5 business days for cash in your bank) or instantly on the Lightning Network. To say that's special is an understatement.

I say again, a blockchain is only as practical as its decentralization. Thus, true decentralization is the entire reason for choosing to use a blockchain.

But as you've guessed where this is going, altcoins however, ARE NOT DECENTRALIZED. In fact, they are completely centralized. They are largely run on AWS (Amazon Web Services, or a similarly controlled database), meaning Amazon is a singular point of potential failure for all those altcoins.

Moreover, these coins have teams, and marketing budgets (people who can be manipulated and coerced, and people who need to get paid). Bitcoin does not. Many of these altcoins thus gave their teams a large amount of coins before making them available to the public; they were pre-mined. That is not a fair system on which to base a sound monetary network. Ethereum, for one, was pre-mined.

Bitcoin is based on a mechanism called Proof-of-Work. Putting in work sounds like the ideals of what fair capitalism competition purports to be. Reward for effort. Whereas altcoins are based on a mechanism called Proof-of-Stake. This means the more you stake, the more you put up, the more say you have in the governance of the protocol. So, the wealthier you are, the more power you get...sounds a lot like recreating the same problems of the current fiat system and global inequality to me. But with Proof-of-Work in Bitcoin, someone who has 16 Bitcoin has just as much power over the network as someone who has 0.00003445 BTC.

Let's remember, we're talking about reforming our world's broken monetary system, finding a way to have a fair, hard money standard to fix the fact that the US dollar, the world's global reserve currency (for how long now?), went off the Gold Standard in 1971. Bitcoin is not about turning a quick buck on now-broken-URLs that used to lead to an AI-drawn monkey image (NFTs).

Furthermore, your jurisdiction may vary, but altcoins are also likely to be deemed Securities, and in violation of various governments' SEC. Bitcoin is the only digital asset to have already been declared a commodity, not a Security, by the US SEC. The legal implications of this are not to be ignored.

Still, laws like this are just a story we humans tell ourselves about how society should operate. Bitcoin, frankly, doesn't care. It's a network that can't be turned off or shut down (Again, that's the power of true decentralization). The cat's out of the bag and it seems not many people have yet groked this very fundamental aspect of the protocol. We are indeed still rather early. Nonetheless, a race of geopolitical game theory has already begun and many countries (and individuals) aren't even aware that they're losing. That's why I'm grateful to be doing this work educating in a part of the world typically most forgotten or blatantly oppressed.

When money can move globally and instantly at zero cost, from even a old-school brick phone via SMS without Internet, countries and jurisdictions that are most friendly to this protocol will reap the greatest benefits first and those that don't, won't. All that bitcoin needs is the participation of those who want to use it. Everyone else will continue using an inflationary currency that a small group of wealthy central planners print ad infitium, thus debasing the savings and purchasing power of innocent people everywhere. Until they've had enough.

There's so much more that could be said, but I'll stop there. For more, listen to Bantu Bitcoin [English] - Episode 4 - "Bitcoin vs. altcoins."

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