Out of control and rising: why bitcoin has Nigeria’s government in a panic

[Dragonfund]

Nigerian government and lame excuse has been in existence and its not stopping anytime soon because it's always embedded in the politicians DNA.
Nigerians Government or rather I should say old men with  stone age knowledge who always want to rule the affairs of economic with high taste in corruption. It's in the blood and its always difficult to remove from the system.
Crypto on the other hand, it has came to liberate the youth who are trying to fed for them selfs but Nigeria government will always be against something they can't override. Bunch of old rokuns.

[rosebrand]

The media in Nigeria in this case of bitcoin issues have been very supporting and making a positive report about bitcoin and cryptocurrency (and they should because cryptocreency doesn't have any business with individual country or persons). The media has continue to do a positive review of the situation and bitcoin. Almost all radio stations and televisions have reported about bitcoin in their daily business news, also federal government stations.

The government will eventually turnaround and come to true realization about cryptocreency because they have not succeeded to stop anything about bitcoin in Nigeria. At the highest cadre, the officials who are internet savvy are dealing with bitcoin.

Moreover, soon twitter is going to come back to operate in Nigeria and you can see that all are just threat against modern system. They can keep threatening but won't have any hold against the threat they made.. It was on the news today that twitter will soon be back in Nigeria.

The Nigerian government should have been grateful it's citizens are getting involved in crypto, from a report I saw sometime ago about Nigeria! So many students graduating yearly but yet no job for them and this makes most individuals feel going to university is worthless, since no jobs most of it's citizens get involved with bitcoin and it's activities thereby being self employed and also financially stable, this process slowly eradicates poverty but instead of the government to appreciate this they are being bitter.

[AicecreaME]

I honestly think that crypto will face a lot of trouble from the dictatorial regimes, ..

Rather than dictatorial regimes, I would say that regimes that are financially irresponsible have basically a fight or flight reaction to bitcoin. They either try to embrace it and corrupt it for their own goals or they try to ban it altogether - finding out that it is nearly impossible by design to do so. On the famous examples of countries that tried to pervert crypto for their own goals is, as it could not be otherwise, Venezuelan and ignominious "Petro". It does not get more shady than that does it?

Valid point.

Dictatorial countries will really cause a big problem to the cryptocurrency's nature because we all know that dictatorship requires being under the surveillance of the government in any way possible. Everything is under the hands of the government to decide what will happen, how it should behave, and how it will be offered to the citizens. With this, strict regulation of cryptocurrency will surely take place under a dictatorial regime. This will just nullify the decentralized nature of crypto.

On the other hand, I also agree that aside from the dictatorial regime, other forms of government can also have a big impact on crypto. If the government cannot handle financial responsibility well, they would opt to be on either side of the coin. Whichever is convenient and fit for their interests, they would side on it. In this instance, the government of Nigeria decided to ban it last February despite it being second in trading overall. In this case, maybe the government of Nigeria is trying to control something. They want to regulate crypto or their want to tax it to get something from it, hence, the act of banning it to let the citizen know they need to impose something in exchange for something.

[kryptqnick]

Given how the restricting measures didn't impact the trading volume seriously, I think it's safe to assume that the crypto community there is very strong, and they aren't afraid of the government. It's great news because Nigeria is under authoritarian regime (according to Democracy index), but people are clearly fighting it nevertheless. Also, given that the attitude towards cryptos is inconsistent and depending on various authorities there are different intentions, I hope the market will get favorably regulated there after all.

According to bitcoin trading platform Paxful, Nigeria is now second only to the US for bitcoin trading.

Wow--that's a surprising fact.  I wouldn't have expected Nigeria to be #2 in terms of trading, even though I know it's very popular there.  Anyone else surprised by that?

I knew Nigeria's a country where people are no strangers to cryptos, but I also had no idea it was #2 after the US by trading volume. I checked a couple of sources, and it seems more or less correct. Nigeria is #3, according to Statista, with Russia being #2 (didn't know that either), but they're pretty close, so it's reasonable to assume that it can vary depending on the estimates and on timing.

[tygeade]

It’s clear that the government of Nigeria never understood cryptocurrency, especially bitcoin. They thought that banning it was going to do them any good, but it wasn’t. Banning cryptocurrencies never stopped Nigerians from making use of it, immediately it got banned, they all switched to making use of p2p platforms such as Binance P2P and Paxful.

Platforms like three saw major increase in their number of new users. Why this is a loss for the government is because they have ended up banning centralized exchanges and that means there wouldn’t be a way for them to keep track of cryptocurrency users, even if they wanted to, since centralized exchange were there the only way the government controls cryptocurrency. And they are also not going to be receiving taxes any longer from these platforms, so it’s kind of a loss for them.