A Twitter thread by Lyn Alden
May 24, 2022 · 2 mins read
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People from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Senegal, Togo, Venezuela, and Afghanistan keep telling me here in person how they use bitcoin to deal with authoritarian bank control or persistent inflation that continually wrecks their savings.
While westerners on Twitter say it’s useless. https://t.co/ujjhKnCefz
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For example, @ireaderinokun from Nigeria, of the Feminist Coalition there, described in Norway’s parliament yesterday how their bank accounts were frozen for protesting police violence, and how bitcoin was used to keep operating despite of that.
https://t.co/lhem0RjXUz
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Mauricio (@cryptonomista) from Venezuela explained how he mined bitcoins, and then used the confiscation-resistant, self-custodial, and portable attributes of the bitcoin he mined, to preserve value and leave Venezuela.
Couldn't do that with gold, fiat, stocks, or real estate.
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Democracy activist @Farida_N, in exile from Togo, described how it's hard for the Togolese diaspora to send money to friends and family back in Togo. The money is often seized in banks. So, they often had to smuggle physical cash.
Bitcoin is now making it easier for them.
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Many people here (@OsloFF) told me how they don't use bank accounts in their countries, due to them having been seized or frozen in the past.
Or they held dollar accounts there to protect against local currency hyperinflation, but those dollars were confiscated.
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Basically, bitcoin is a tool.
Like how a VPN can make it easier to send and receive information in hostile computer networks, bitcoin can make it easier to send, receive, or store value in hostile financial networks.
Some people need and understand those tools more than others.
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It's like having money in the cloud, except even the cloud provider can't close the account, because the cloud provider is decentralized.
So anyone with internet access can memorize a seed phrase, travel globally, and be able to access their coins, or transfer them to others.
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