Bitcoin Tools for Traveling the World – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast”, hosted by P and Q. In this episode they are joined by Joe Hall to talk about Bitcoin Amsterdam and his experience seeing bitcoin being used in Africa.
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Q: Can we discuss what were the things where you were, “No, Bitcoin doesn’t work because of this,” and then it took you having that experience in Africa to then see and discard those biases?
Joe Hall: That’s a very interesting way of asking that question. So how did I undo my biases? I think some of it gets burned. We’ve all been a little burned or roughed up by shitcoins. Like many other Bitcoiners, I shitcoined first. There are still some tokens in a wallet somewhere that I can’t sell because there’s no liquidity because it’s just been completely robust to zero. It is the personal experience.
I’m a journalist, so I’m all about primary sources. Seeing my driver, for example, which was the example I gave [at Bitcoin Amsterdam], he’s the first guy to really show me that Bitcoin works and it’s used this way. We’re all talking about censorship-resistant money and money that can’t be debased, money that can’t be stolen. As long as you have your seed set, you’re good to go.
This guy called Giam, he used to be our driver at Bloomberg. He drove us to work every day. We used to have quite long conversations about Bitcoin and crypto and he effectively beat me to the orange. The big thing for him was that the government can’t steal the money from him, whereas they can easily steal the money that’s under your mattress, or they can debase your currency like they’ve done with the West African franc or the CFA in the past. Alex Gladstein did this wonderful piece about the West African franc, which is like this horrible colonial hangover currency.
The French came together in a sense when they returned power to their colonies in West Africa. Basically, the patches are printed and designed in the Élysée in France, which literally means a white guy sat in a university in France and drew palm trees and coconuts and thought, “Oh yeah, this is what we should put on the patch in the West. Africa.” It’s like the most damn racist thing you can imagine and this is still what’s on the paper. It’s just funny when you think they’re printed in Paris and shipped to West Africa.
This is just one example of how messed up this whole currency situation is. That’s one of the things that really annoys me about money in general, fiat-backed currencies. In the West we have it bad, but in many emerging markets around the world the situation is deplorable and we need to do more to help people understand what money is and why bitcoin is money we can opt out of. current horrible, controlling system.
The thing about Bitcoin and crypto is that it is evidence based. Do you know Paco in India, the bitcoin runner? He’s the guy who travels the world using only bitcoin. He is currently in his 22nd country and he is trying to hit 40 countries in 500 days. He is fantastic. I catch him regularly just to see what his stories are like and we have pretty similar interests. He said today that the Bitcoin community in Africa is massive. It is one where people realize that bitcoin is a natural currency. You can buy a beer with it, you can pay a taxi with it, you can do all these kinds of real things. You’re not going to buy your beer with dogecoin, are you? Yes, people do it for the stunt, but it’s not like you’re going to see a “doge accepted here” sticker around the world. People are just going to laugh at you.
The fact that it has this first-mover advantage and the fact that it has this critical mass adoption, that there’s no real turning back from it. Despite cardano’s best marketing efforts, especially in Africa where there is a large cardano community. It’s terrible. They’re like buying up universities and saying, “Oh, we’re going to put your ID on the blockchain.” The guy is an excellent marketer. Charles Hoskinson knows how to build a business. But you have to ask, “Why can’t we do all this with Bitcoin?”
P: And the answer is, you can and you should.
Hall: Exactly
