How African Scams Make Me Bullish On Bitcoin

The incredible story of sending money to Africa.

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My friend, we’ll call him Jack, is leaving for Africa in a few days. In preparation for his trip, began exploring the world of local dating sites.

Unsure of where he’s going, he’s connected with women in multiple countries, from Uganda and Kenya to Namibia and Zimbabwe.

While he’s met some cool ladies, the sites are laden with scammers. The ruse is quite obvious: post an impossibly hot half naked picture of a model, engage with curious men, and string them along to ultimately ask for a payment of some kind.

The trending punch line: “I just need $20 for a data plan so I can video call you.”

Here’s where the story gets interesting. My friend is an odd duck, so instead of backing off when he realizes it’s a scam (which happens long before they ask for money), he plays along.

“I figured, what the heck, if they need the money that bad I may as well help them out,” Jack told me.

Armed with a cause and a lot of free time, he grew determined to send this poor woman (who he later learns is actually a man), the $20 for ‘their data plan.’

In Africa, they don’t have services like PayPal and Venmo, so Jack was instructed to use obscure money remittance programs such as Lemonade Finance. He created accounts on several websites, entered his card details and the recipients info, but was unable to send the funds.

“I kept getting an error code,” he told me. Pot committed, and now curious about the process, he went to a brick and mortar remittance store. Same error. He was instructed to call a phone number, ‘but don’t expect to get through. Wait times can be hours,’ he was told.

‘In the past 48 hours, I’ve spent at least 10 trying to send money to this girl in Africa.’

Finally, he gave up. He went back to his date and told her (him) the bad news. ‘I can send you Bitcoin,’ he said as a last resort.

Initially, she refused. But sure enough, 24 hours later, she came back with a Bitcoin address. In less than a minute, Jack copy and pasted her address, clicked a few buttons, and sent her the funds.

Banking the Unbanked

According to Business Insider and McKinsey, over 2 billion people worldwide are unbanked. That’s more than 25% of the world!

Bitcoin allows for anyone anywhere to be onboarded to the global financial system, and store their wealth in the hardest form of money ever invented, which cannot be debased by governments.

People can not only remit money back to their families in Africa, but make investments abroad, ushering in new opportunities to grow their wealth.

Jacks story is a microcosm of what is going to spur global Bitcoin adoption. A first principle I’ve learned from studying monetary history is that the most efficient money always wins. Bitcoin allows for an incredible ease of use, immediate frictionless onboarding, and instant peer to peer transfers.

The legacy financial system, especially in third world countries, cannot compete. Bitcoin is a bottom up revolution where one by one, free market actors can opt out from the gate kept financial system and currency debasement.

Countries will increase their stranglehold and make desperate attempts to maintain their power, which will only further Bitcoin adoption. The harder they push, the faster people will opt out.

Bitcoin’s path dependence to becoming global money has just begun, but it’s becoming more likely every day. As Victor Hugo famously said, ‘no force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.’

Alec