Excerpt
I discuss the challenges and opportunities of the Lightning Network and Bitcoin’s role in defending freedoms in Africa. I share my experiences with early Bitcoin wallets and how they’ve improved to become more user-friendly. Additionally, I explain how Bitcoin empowers individuals in oppressive regimes, using personal stories and examples from my time in Africa.
Transcript
It takes time until technologies, especially decentralized technologies like Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, can be adopted and implemented in a way that they can serve millions, billions of people in the way that we imagine now it should be, you know? I mean YouTube did not work like today, 10 years ago or eight years ago. I think the more people use Lightning, the more they will see how reliable it actually is today. I started my first Lightning wallet, I know very much exactly, in January 2019, I opened my first channel, actually not really knowing what I was doing, but I had it. I can remember how difficult it was back then compared to today to wallets like Mutiny, Phoenix, Breeze; they are very convenient and really easy to use. And so most of the time, I have no problem to onboard people to these kinds of wallets because you don’t need to explain blocktime to people or mining fees or coin control, which is a topic when the fees are going up like in the last couple of months, suddenly, we need to talk about coin control, and it’s not that easy. It’s easy to onboard people, to push them into a wallet and say, “Here you are,” but it takes a long time, basically, and that’s from my own experience, until you realize what you all need to know to manage your on-chain bitcoin in an efficient and secure manner. So Lightning wallets are an incredibly helpful tool because they obfuscate all those problems basically; they are not there. But yes, as you say, sometimes opening a channel at the moment is very expensive, and I get screenshots of people from Zambia who are actually angry and disappointed and saying, “What’s going on here?” I mean, because I tell them always use Phoenix; it’s self-custodial, and that’s important for your funds. They show me these screenshots where you see they open the channel with an amount of $80 US, and suddenly they see it’s only $55 left or something inside the channel, and they are like, “What is going on here? Where’s my money gone?” It’s hard to explain. That’s why I’m very happy to see at conferences like the Tuscany Lightning conference today and these days that the development is ongoing. I mean, I knew it; it’s just a reassurance for me to see how far we have come. But we need to say it will take another some years until the possibilities that we see here today with Bolt12 and other improvements like Nostr wallet connect, for instance. I mean, I’m totally optimistic that we’re getting there where we want, but it takes time. From my experience in the Global South, it’s more used as a medium of exchange, but of course, it’s also used as a store of value because Bitcoin can be both, and it is both, and we know that. So, I think it’s funny that there are these discussions, and it seems that more people on Twitter, at least, think it’s a store of value, but that is because those people are all from the US or other Western countries who have the possibility to save. Most people in the Global South can’t, and they have far more authoritarian leaders than we do. I mean, I hope they are less authoritarian here, but this is a phenomenon we have everywhere, so they have more the need to use it as a medium of exchange because you simply can’t send money easily in and out of many of these countries and many African countries also within itself. I believe that the whole discussion is very Western-centric, like not thinking about the needs or not knowing the needs because how should you know when you’ve never been there and never spent time there and never experienced the problems firsthand and also their solutions that Bitcoin can bring there. So for me, it’s both, and I just see that in the, let’s say the Global North, it’s more seen as a store of value, and in the Global South, it’s more used as a medium of exchange. In Zimbabwe, for instance, 80% of the cryptocurrency that’s being exchanged is Tether, and 20% is bitcoin. They definitely also use it as a store of value and for the purpose of having a stable coin, they use Tether. Because it’s still not in the minds of people and in the heads of people that over time the volatility of bitcoin is lower than their inflation than their loss of value in the own national currency and in the US dollar. Yes, it made me more open definitely for the idea of Bitcoin and for a tool that helps us to empower ourselves against rules that someone made up, which can basically be totally against your identity or what you want to do, your basic freedoms. Yeah, and from that perspective, Bitcoin, in my view, is the only tool that fulfills that need because it’s the only tool that’s really uncensorable. Just as an example, in Zambia, I met with a woman. She organized some protests in her country. She’s a lesbian rights group, homosexual rights group, and she was arrested, and the first thing that the government did was close down her bank account. So that’s where you can see how Bitcoin can help all different groups and human rights issues, enforce human rights basically in the world. So yeah, that’s why I’m into Bitcoin. The Crack The Orange program where we have an online learning program for aspiring educators and Bitcoin community founders, builders, to learn everything they need about Bitcoin to share that knowledge with their communities in their countries, and we have a scholarship program which enables people to do that for free. The focus is on having at least like onboarding 200 of these educators and community builders in a year. We started in August, last August, and so far, we had 120 applications, so we are on the way.
