Excerpt
Explore the reality of Bitcoin scams and the technical challenges in Africa. Join me as I uncover the obstacles that many face on the continent.
Transcript
So, the first question most people ask me about Bitcoin is, “Is it not a scam?” because so many people have been scammed and are being scammed by rip-offs, like people who say, “This is Bitcoin; invest $50 today, and in three weeks you get $200.” And the sad thing is that people believe these stories because they don’t know better and are so desperate to save money or to get money that they fall for these scams. But especially in Africa, right? That’s what I’ve been told – especially in Africa, there are people who’ve been scammed around cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. Just think about OneCoin. I think OneCoin is still going on somewhere, always in African countries. Or Worldcoin, which is also a scam and even worse because they also scan your eyes. I mean, they basically take all your privacy away from you. People are so needy for money that they take the $25 they get for scanning their eyeballs because they need the $25 – it’s a lot of money for them. So, scams are actually the biggest problem. But then also, yeah, technical problems. If you don’t have power, you can’t use Bitcoin in a way. But on the other hand, to be honest, I have seen so many people with smartphones, I was really surprised by that. A challenge also is that data is very expensive. For instance, in Zimbabwe, people do have WhatsApp bundles, so they only buy internet that allows them to use WhatsApp, or they have a Facebook bundle, which gives them access to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. That’s the reason why a lot of people believe that Facebook is the internet because they can’t access the worldwide web. Which is also a challenge because then they can’t download apps. I mean, they can download them maybe from the Play Store, but I don’t know if their data packages even work for that.
