Excerpt
Anita Posch shares her insights from spending the last five years working on Bitcoin education across several African countries. She explains why real adoption requires local solutions, not “adoption theater,” and why privacy, self-custody, and permissionlessness are non-negotiable. She also highlights powerful stories of activists, community builders, and initiatives shaping the future of Bitcoin on the continent. Watch now!
Transcript
Hello everyone. Great to be here. It’s my fourth time. I’m very honored to be here again. Amazing work that Farida has been doing over the years and her team as well, of course. So in 2020 when I visited Zimbabwe the first time I found no Bitcoin-only education initiative on the African continent. Today there are more than 150. Sounds like an incredible success story, right? When you spend time on the ground you will discover the impact is often minimal if it exists at all. Decades of foreign aid money and more or less good intentioned projects have led to expectations. In our work on the ground, we learned that paying people transport money and providing lunch is necessary. Otherwise, they wouldn’t show up to our free workshops. Data is expensive. Often the connectivity is bad, making online learning impossible for many. It’s difficult to measure the impact of general Bitcoin ed education. What you will find are graduation photos, celebrations, videos of onboarded merchants, copy pasting initiatives, and chasing funding. Many projects are adoption theater, not real adoption. Bitcoin education is not charity. Its intention is to build the foundation for applied freedom. I want to quote my friend activist and found of this amazing conference Farida Nabourema: “I come from Togo, a country ruled by one of the longest standing dictatorships in Africa where repression extends even to financial flows. People have been arrested and jailed simply for receiving money suspected of supporting political efforts. For me, sending funds back home as a highly exposed activist was never just a matter of convenience, but of safety. Bitcoin gave me the ability to send money privately and securely without exposing those I care about such risks.” I myself have spent most of the last five years working on the ground in different African countries with a strong focus on the subsaharan region. I spent one and one and a half years in Zimbabwe. I have the freedom to leave whenever I please. 17 million Zimbabweans are trapped in hyperinflation. They have seen six different currencies since independence in 1980. Today, they are doing what is best. They simply refuse to use the newest currency called Zimbabwe gold. Last year, I saw one ZiG bank note while it was handed around because no one ever had seen one. Zimbabwe is the poster child of how the fiat system can be corrupted to cater those who are in the line to eat. It shows how money that is based on in issuance of debt serves the powerful, not the people. This is why Bitcoin matters. Bitcoin is the only true alternative to the system of repression and control. Make no mistake, in the near future, there will be no other financial technology as revolutionary as Bitcoin. Developing a global permissionless digital money that empowers individuals and the civil society was possible 17 years ago. Today, it would not go unnoticed. We have one shot at this. Activists like Farida, donors to freedom movements and campaigns protecting democratic change have to stay safe while using Bitcoin. We need to build tools that are protecting privacy are decentralized and permissionless. These foundational principles should be integrated in everything that we build. Then anyone and everyone is safe. We need to add Bitcoin rails into existing applications that are used by millions. Some great examples are Tando with which you can pay anyone in Kenya with Bitcoin. Machankurra where you can use Bitcoin within WhatsApp or if you own a feature phone you can send and receive Bitcoin even without internet. Money badger. Money badger enabled solutions with which you can pay with Bitcoin in thousands of stores all over South Africa. These applications are centralized at the moment and will need to find a path to decentralization but they are solutions to real problems built by locals and also within the adoption theater a lot of initiatives have done remarkable work. Bitcoin Dada, the pioneer in bringing Bitcoin to females. Bitcoin Ekasi, the first circular economy in Africa. Bitcoin Zambia, Bitcoin Reach and Yebo Bitcoin in Zimbabwe or Bitcoin farmer in Mozambique just to name a few. After five years of our Bitcoin for fairness work and two years of scholarships for African educators and community builders in our Crack the Orange program, we see members of initiatives from South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe supporting each other, sharing knowledge and opportunities in our borderless scholars group. It takes years of dedicated work to see the impact. But because of the groundwork we all have been doing and because of the fact that more and more people are realizing that Bitcoin is their last resort, the tool that helps them overcome real obstacles, the use has been rising. In the last year, the cryptocurrency volume handled in the subsaharan area has shot up shot up, making it the third fastest growing region in the world. Bitcoin is inevitable, but we need to stay vigilant. Colonialism has reemerged a step-based imperialism. Now it’s time, now this time it’s showing its grim face in capturing African Bitcoin for foreign interests. Bitcoin mining in Africa is mainly in the hands of China. US American strategists are planning to capture Africa’s energy sources to produce American Bitcoin, leaving behind grams their bad performing US dollars. When the Bitcoin network gets sucked up and regulated by the state-backed corporate industrial complex, it loses its teeth. It’s just another tamed tiger in the hands of the few. Too many Bitcoiners simply repeat what they read on social media, focusing on institutional adoption, Western investment narratives, and number go up messaging. But you can’t meme yourself into financial freedom. It’s time to ask yourself, what can you do for Bitcoin? Not what can Bitcoin do for you. Request being paid in Bitcoin. Spend it in your community. Develop solutions with the focus on privacy, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance. Don’t let foreign investors extract wealth from your countries like they have done for centuries. They come dressed as forces of good promising growth. But they only enriched a few while trapping everyone else in debt. Think long term. Run notes. Mind to your own advantage and build for your fellow Africans and the world. In conclusion, what does it take to unleash Bitcoin’s potential? Distinguish adoption theater from real adoption. Real adoption is earning, spending, and saving Bitcoin. Build local solutions for local problems. Stop copy pasting foreign models. The solutions that work on the ground can only be built by locals. If foreigners benefit more than your community, it’s extraction, not development. Privacy, self-custody, and censorship resistance are non-negotiable. They are what makes Bitcoin giving back power to people. Real impact takes years. Resist short-term thinking. Sustainable change doesn’t happen in one workshop or conference. We have one shot. Defend Bitcoin or watch it get captured. The fight is to preserve Bitcoin’s permissionless, uncensorable nature against state capture, corporate control, and neocolonial extraction. Resist letting Bitcoin become just another tool in the hands of the powerful. This is my call for action. As an aspiring educator or builder, apply for a scholarship for our Crack the Orange program to learn, connect and grow. As a supporter, next year we will be doing work in South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. If you would like to back us, please feel free to get in touch. Thank you.
