Bitcoin Forum

I live in Nigerian and since our presidential election,the our local fiat became scarce due to change in the newly redesign of the currency which makes it difficult for most people here to get physical cash for business and daily transactions because the banking system is overloaded with too many internet transactions making it hard for me to access my cash.  So now I want to convert my whole cash in my bank account to bitcoin but don’t know if is a good idea for me or not. I know in crypto world, it will be easy to access my money but the issue is, will my money be same value when I invest all of it in bitcoin .

Because literally in banking system for example, if you have $5000 that will be the value in 3 to 5 months and will add a little interest in it so my question is-  I don't fully know how bitcoin works. Is it the same way with the banking system? Will I get more value or less value in future times?

The amount of bitcoin you have in your wallet will remain unchanged. 1 BTC will be always 1 BTC, but the value of your bitcoin in fiat currencies may change over time.
Take note that what you get as interest from the banks isn't really a profit if you consider the inflation rate.

Nope, you won't get any interest. However, if you anticipate the Bitcoin price to go up, then technically you would gain more in terms of converting it back to fiat. However, if you have 1 Bitcoin, and don't add to that it's going to stay at 1 Bitcoin forever.

Technically, Bitcoin is deflationary in the long term, and you could probably make the a somewhat confident assumption that it will continue to rise in terms of Bitcoin to fiat valuation. However, most interest on fiat currencies isn't worth it anyway, and usually the inflation rate is higher than the interest rate so you aren't gaining anything to begin with. If interest rates is what's keeping your money in the bank, I'd reconsider as it's worthless. Interest rate means absolutely nothing unless you have a ton of money which can make a whole lot of money in a year or so.

This does not solve your issue in anyway: what you lack is physical cash as it has become difficult to withdraw cash from the bank due to the recent CBN policies on the naira, thus even if you convert all your naira for Bitcoins, you still do not have physical cash, but Bitcoins in your wallet. It even becomes worse in this case because you can hardly find any merchant accepting Bitcoins for payment in the country.
Since you don't know how Bitcoin works, i'd advice you hodl your money in the bank until you understand what you are doing to avoid loss.

I'm not aware of what's currently happening in Nigeria. However, banks rejecting you access to your money is one of the biggest motivations I'd say to finding an alternative. At least, with Bitcoin they'd never be rejected their right to their money. Obviously, paying with Bitcoin, and using Bitcoin really does depend on your local situations. Although, cities tend to offer a decent amount of services, and goods for Bitcoin. So, if you live somewhere which Bitcoin is popular in you can probably get by. Potentially, renting or mortgages would be the only limiting factors.

I think I'd prefer to hold my wealth in my hands, than a bank that's rejecting access to your money. If you can't withdraw your own money, then that's a red flag too me that the banks struggling or abusing it's power. You should always be able to access your own money.

Even you get little interest from your saving account, but if you calculate with the inflation rate, I believe the inflation rate is higher than your interest. In the next year your will earn $20 interest from your $5,000, so it would be $5,020. But the value of your $5,020 isn't same like $5,000, it might already become $4,970. So it's mean you're lose the value.

Bitcoin doesn't work like that because Bitcoin isn't Proof Of Stake, it's Proof Of Work where there's a maximum supply. The price is determined from demand and supply.

The CBN recently rolled out new cash/withdrawal policies, this created cash scarcity and restrictions to physical cash use, not to get into too much details but it has resulted in hardship for the people of Nigeria. Of course this is a very good reason to use Bitcoin, because with Bitcoin no institution can restrict your money: it is permissionless, but how do you spend Bitcoins in Nigeria, it is almost impossible, you can't find merchants that accept Bitcoin for payment, and if you want to convert your Bitcoin to cash through P2P, you receive your fiat in your bank account, and face the same problem over again. OP is considering converting all their money to circumvent this problem, but it doesn't solve it because they still do not have cash. What OP should is to convert a part of their money to Bitcoin and leave the rest of it in their bank for spending.
We share absolutely the same view, i was only pointing it out to OP that converting all their money into Bitcoin doesn't solve the issue of available cash for spending in Nigeria. Do not forget that the only restriction here is on physical cash use, you can use mobile transfer to nearly an unlimited amount, but the banking network is usually a problem and quite a lot of merchants prefer payment with cash.

Is there no other channel for payments over there? In my country, we have various digital fiat wallet that doesn't necessarily rely on banks to process the transaction. I'm somewhat surprised that it is not the same there since online payment has become popular. Not the ideal solution but can be an alternative for small spending, definitely don't use them to store most of your money though. If Bitcoin stores are easily accessible, this would be the best time to use them for daily needs.

Whether a coin use PoS or PoW has no correlation to its max supply afaik, as it's a number that can be changed. How easy or hard it is to change will depend on many things, including but not limited to community consensus, how distributed the network control is, etc. Even if you hold PoS coins/tokens, you also need to do something if you want passive income.

I don't know how the adoption of Bitcoin is in your area but mine is quite low so if I should convert all my money to Bitcoin I'll end up not being able to purchase anything because no one accepts Bitcoin as a payment method in my side, so I'll advice that you look for a means to withdraw your money from the bank we have POS services that does that without you having to visit your bank ^{although some charges are added} it will be better to have cash than to put your money in banks that restricts how you go about with your spending.

If not for online business, to receive funds from P2P trades and also because I need to debit card to buy coins online I don't see any use for bank.

You can not convert your Naira to Bitcoin directly with your bank account. You must use your Naira to buy Bitcoin, it's not convert.

If it is your first time to buy Bitcoin, let's try with small Naira as your first practice. If it goes well, you don't make any mistake, you can proceed a next one with bigger value.

Buying Bitcoin then storing it in non custodial wallet like Electrum wallet that is free and does not need big storage space in your computer. It is available for mobile devices too.

https://electrum.org/#download
[GUIDE] How to Safely Download and Verify Electrum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240594.0)

Converting in Bitcoin is the best thing to do if you are uncertain on the future of your fiat money. But since your concern is the delay to access your funds is it will be just the same with Bitcoin if you will plan to spend it since Bitcoin is not a legal tender on your country while you still need to convert it to fiat when you will use it? The problem is your banking system delays of processing your cash which means this problem will be the same on crypto the moment you will use it to purchase goods in your country.

For safety precautions, Converting to Bitcoin is the right thing to do if you are scared that your fiat will be turn into shit right after the election.

Ops at the moment it's better to hold all your balance in bitcoin and in your personal wallet with private keys, exchange is not recommended.
Hold your balance in bitcoin and spendable amount on an exchange wallet where you can easily convert and send to any bank card for pos withdrawal, at this time were banking transaction both cash and online transfers in Nigeria is down decentralized finance is the way to go and at the moment quite a good number of Nigerians are already benefiting from all this.

I see that you are a newbie, welcome. To your question. If you were in a country where most businesses have no issues accepting Bitcoin as a payment option,then I would say you should go ahead but this is not the case in Nigeria.

In Nigeria one of the aims of the new cash redesign policy according to the Central Bank of Nigeria is a  cashless economy. This hasn't been achieved because we still have people who are unbanked, our bank internet servers needs to be upgraded to handle several requests and many more. Besides not everyone uses or accepts Bitcoin I'm exchange for goods or services. In my estimation, it is about 0.1% of the population that do.

So before you make the big move, ask yourself
- how many businesses would accept Bitcoin for payment?
- would I need to convert my Bitcoin into cash, the Nigerian currency before I can make any purchase?
- can I pay the cab/Uber driver in cash?

The answer to the question will tell you what to do.

What I will tell you is to put some percentage in Bitcoin, some percentage in precious metals, in real estate and in stocks(if you wish). As a newbie remember, invest only what you can afford to lose.

Bitcoin investing plans are always admirable.  But before investing in Bitcoin you must understand its risks and find a good non-custodial or a hardware wallet and store it there. And of course you need to hold those bitcoins for a long time otherwise you won't get very good profit from here and you may face loss as well.  Because Bitcoin will not guarantee you this profit all the time. To get profit from this you must hold it for long time

When you deposit money in a bank, it is held as collateral and you can withdraw it whenever you want without any loss. And after a certain period of time the bank gives you interest at a certain percentage rate but in case of Bitcoin your money will never be stable like the bank. If you keep your money on Bitcoin then your money can decrease or increase every moment, as if you buy shares of a company from the stock market, if the price of that company's shares increases, then you will profit and if the price decreases, then you will lose, in this case, the price of your shares will never be stable.  Similarly with bitcoin investing your money will not be stable it will always go up and down so if you keep your money on bitcoin for long time in this case you will have high profit potential. i am not giving you any financial advice. so do anything from your own research

Take note that the fiat currency you hold in banks isn't stable in value.
The bank show you a number as your balance and increase that number as they give you some interest. But this doesn't mean the value of your balance increases. The government prints more money and decreases the real value of your balance.

In general, any non-custodial BTC wallet is better than custodial options, but only if certain prerequisites are met.

• That the computer or smartphone on which we will install the wallet is clean of viruses/malware, and that we do not use it for those activities that carry potential risks (cracked software, torrents, pornographic websites).
• That these devices have at least some kind of protection against the aforementioned threats, and that they are up to date regarding their operating systems.
• That whoever uses such a wallet knows the importance of a backup, and does not save it in an inappropriate way (as plain text on a computer, in the cloud or e-mail).

For someone who wants to convert all their funds into Bitcoin, all the above mentioned things are extremely important, with the note of course that volatility should always be kept in mind - because not so long ago the price of BTC exceeded $25k, and today it is close to $22K, which is not easy to accept for most beginners.

Before you do this conversion please get this clear, if you only want to convert your money into crypto due to the stated reasons and you are afraid of having your money go down in value, please don't convert into Bitcoin there are stable coin out there like USDT , USDC etc to do that, but if base on this your experience and this reason you want to invest the money into Bitcoin in order to have full control of your funds be aware that Bitcoin is volatile and sometime you either have your funds decrease or increase in value as a result of supply and demand in the price. In the overall idea Bitcoin only rewards patient investors and not fearful investors due to its Volatility.

It will better you know more about bitcoin first before you just decide to convert all your money to bitcoin, don't just jump into bitcoin investment because you hear people investing in bitcoin so that you won't endup losing your money.

I think the Supreme Court just order that the old #200, 500 and #1000 should remain in circulation till December 31 2023. am sure with this news things will go back to normal gradually (https://twitter.com/channelstv/status/1631616327562428416?s=46&t=JQaZa0X1IpqmjaFtOjOY8Q).

Also Nigeria is also having a local board on the forum already, I think it will be better if you can be active on the local board, am sure you will learn lots of things from the local board and how you can easily convert the money in your bank account into bitcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=275.0).

You would still have to sell Bitcoin for your local currency to be able to make purchases daily. Bitcoin adoption is not advanced enough to enable one to survive entirely on bitcoin or any other alternative payment method.

Fiat suffers inflation and Bitcoin does not. If you are bothered about what asset would retain the value of your savings, Bitcoin is the obvious pick.

- Jay -

I don't think it's gonna be profitable the way you want it; especially for the fact that the naira - Dollar rate ain't even friendly, the big difference is clear and I don't think you'd wanna risk you cash.
Secondly, I'm sure you wouldn't wanna take  -- the fact that you aren't able to withdraw your funds -- as an excuse to conceive this whole idea, Cus how will you survive if this is prolly the whole funds you've got? The situation is bad and we all know, but there are revenues to get to a common resolution. Remember, when HODLING, it's advisable that you don't choose to HODL outta fraustration or for some economical traumas in FIAT. ^{I'm NOT discouraging you dude, but just be careful out there.}

Sandra 🧑‍🦰

Your physical cash might have chances to depreciate in the future, unlike bitcoin it’s highly volatile so it has bigger chances that it’s present value will still grow in the future, or it may drop quickly when you least expect it, so the risks is still there. I suggest you keep some physical cash and convert some into bitcoin, but always remember to convert only an amount you can afford to lose. Bitcoin is still uncertain in the future, but it will be life changing if ever it’s price suddenly reaches its highest peak and turn you highly profitable that time.

If I am correct the scarcity of naira which is the local currency of Nigeria became scare even before the election, the scarcity started with the unplanned process from the central bank of Nigeria to transcend from their old note to the new note.

And to add to your decision of swapping your money to Bitcoin may not work as you envision because Nigerian government isn’t Crypto-currency friendly so spending in Bitcoin would be the problem here.

Is it not that a risk that if you convert your whole savings in BTC, there is a chance that your investment may reduce in value? Remember that BTC is volatile- if you can handle its volatility and accept the fact that your initial investment might decrease, then go for it. But having no physical cash on hand, despite the problems the bank is facing, can be problematic especially when an emergency arises.

Personally, I would convert at least half of my bank savings as BTC and save the other half as cash. In this way, you get the best of both worlds of investing and at the same time, having cash on hand in case of an emergency.

Seems bad regulation with your country how to get cash out our money in the bank, most crazy rule from Nigerian president with limited withdrawing cash out money from the bank in daily day. Nigerian have more popular in African countries with highest cryptocurrency transaction in daily day. I think easy if you want to know about how to convert it and better ask with your local board for easy understanding how to do it.

But have limited fiat withdrawing in the bank with your money? its rule adopted in your country seems very difficult to convert in bitcoin because daily day limited withdraw very small and need waiting for longer time.

Bro I think you should first of all get a proper knowledge of crypto before thinking to get involved with it as there is a very high volatility involved in it, which implies that nothing (profit/loss) is guaranteed in crypto.
Secondly I also want you to understand that Bitcoin or crypto isn't an alternative for banks  as I'm very sure that there are very few Marchants who will want to accept Bitcoin as a legal tender because even with the cashless policy in Nigeria, alot of persons and businesses are weeping because they can't do mobile transactions and I'm sure the transaction fee of crypto is another area of concentration.
So personally I wouldn't advice you to transfer all your money into crypto but you should rather invest what you're willing to lose.

Don't invest yet until you fully understand everything about Bitcoin, you could possibly lose the value of your investment or you can have ten-time profit of what the banks can give you, but the most important here is understanding the market, that is why here in Bitcointalk we strongly advise all new investors to only invest what they can afford to lose.
If it's your life savings and for emergencies don't put everything in Bitcoin investment, there might come a time that you need to trade and the market is down and you lose the value of your investment, so think twice before investing.

It's fine if you want to convert it to Bitcoin but your present problem will still exist because your problem is not having enough physical cash to use in your daily lives. You can't do it in Bitcoin because you still need to convert your BTC to fiat if you need it and that would complicate things even more.

Best thing you have to do is secure or withdraw all of your money but only invest in Bitcoin with your extra money. Then proceed to read how Bitcoin works to secure your money. Now, the problem rely on whether you can wait for the price to grow up since the price of Bitcoin is very volatile which means it can grow and drop anytime depending on how you understand the market.

didn't know there was such a rule in Nigeria that it is difficult for us to get cash, even though we only withdraw our own money at the bank but the bank regulates limited funds for customers. One of the worst impacts of banks is that they regulate anything on our funds. It is very different from bitcoin that decentralized system gives ownership of funds to the owner without any rules.

Even though OP wants to convert funds to bitcoin investment but he must know important things about crypto before investing in bitcoin, it is better to allocate 20-30% of $5k for bitcoin investment or convert to usdt to prevent high economic inflation.

how bitcoin works and how banking works is very different, bitcoin is not centralized and does not require a server. it is different from banks which are fully controlled by government agencies.
money that is bought in bitcoin, in my opinion it's better if that's the purpose of investing, but if you only intend to save for a while I don't think so. because if you take your money when you need it, while the market is down, that's troublesome too.
in conclusion
if you save money in bitcoin for investment it is very good
but if you save money just to be safe it's actually not bad, but if it's money for daily needs it's better to just pay it off.

The bank interest they charge is meager and doesn't cover inflation at all. Especially the inflation that is in African countries (it's just crazy). By keeping your notional $5,000 in the bank, you're just watching it depreciate and lose purchasing power. There is such an assertion that money is not a tool for storing value and it is extremely unprofitable to store it in this way. Money is an instrument of exchange. BTC - on the contrary, it has already become an investment tool, which allows not only to compensate for inflation, but also to increase wealth due to the growth in value. If you don't know enough about bitcoin, then look it up on the forum. In the long run, you will most likely be able to get more value at it. With money, especially in the bank, this is basically impossible.

So sorry to see what is happening in Nigeria right now. I sympathize with you and your people.

I think the best option for you is to keep doing research and do what you can to get even just a few dollars worth of bitcoin to learn the basics of how it works. Learn how to receive it on the lightning network and on the main blockchain. This can be done with a simple lightning wallet like Muun, Breez, or Phoenix (https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/learn/what-is-a-lightning-wallet). Learn how you can accept it as payment with others like you and slowly build a local bitcoin economy. If you have any Naira that you can spend on bitcoin, spend just a little to get some and get familiar with sending and receiving. No need to put all of your money into BTC until you fully understand the benefits.

Bitcoin is absolutely going to be better than the e-Naira which is a tool to control the people. Bitcoin will allow you to control your own money and transact freely amongst others who also use bitcoin. I think you can find a local community easily enough to begin to learn how to receive and send bitcoin on the lightning network and then how to use it on the blockchain.

I am sure that you can also find more content available in Africa as well as some meetup groups who are building a better system.

Please let me know if you need any more help but I think this thread will give you all of the answers you need. Africa is rising and Bitcoin will be a big part of its success.

If you convert your entire money to Bitcoin how do you spend them on local commodities. Most of the market women/men don't own a bank account for online transaction not to mention owning a Bitcoin wallet. Crypto generally is not a legal tender in Nigeria so if you are converting your entire money to Bitcoin do it on the grounds of investment and not a banking method because you will need to exchange them back to fiat when ever you need to spend it.

Bitcoin price has not be well doing overtime now, I hope you're aware of that? And the current cashless situations in your country do not technical makes you free from it if you convert your money to bitcoin, primary reason why we put money in the banks is not for interest purpose but savings but there are some special accounts for interest purpose like fixed deposits, if that's were your money is, I guess is for a fixed period of time because putting it into bitcoin will still gives you concern if the market value go against you. Though the figure or piece of bitcoin purchase remain same normal the price rotation.

So my kind advice is expect positive and possible change in your country, savings is good and investment is good as well, when things are in order you can divided your projects and still have some savings. Don't be in a rash especially when you said you don't know much about bitcoin.