Africa Isnt Ready For Bitcoins

[masterchief001]

Africa is very much ready for bitcoins the reason most of us are not rich through bitcoins is that we normally use it for our day to day activities and not save them, we had no idea that it was going to skyrocket through the roofs as time goes by.

No, Africa is not ready for bitcoin, it's only available in some developed countries, whereas in underdeveloped countries, the internet is not popular, which is a huge obstacle to the development of bitcoin. Even though some countries are alienated from technology, they do not know bitcoin.

[CryptonomyCapital]

I agree with you, I think blockchain will help the world solve many problems including corruption. It will take some time, and it will not be easy, but I'm sure that the future is for blockchain.

[warrior333]

I agree with you, I think blockchain will help the world solve many problems including corruption. It will take some time, and it will not be easy, but I'm sure that the future is for blockchain.

How bitcoin can help in the fight against corruption. When you say it seems to me that you have made for yourself crypto currency in religion. You can believe in its future, but faith must be based on facts. Bitcoin you attribute properties which are not.

[buwaytress]

It really depends on what sort of impact you want to have. It's too easy to say Africa and forget what that can mean. Your 18% population who own smartphones are concentrated in a few countries, and in a few major urban areas. The Humaniq project and Stellar Lumens are two crypto projects I know are working in Africa, and both in Western Africa (my guess is Nigeria is the most ready) but even they cannot possibly hope to "change" things with crypto.

You have to spend time there, do research there, and be serious about practical implementations vs policy. You can't just say Africa without any context.

[dillpicklechips]

The price of Bitcoin doesn't matter. Transaction fees do.
High transaction fees kill micropayments and that rules out Bitcoin from poor countries.

This is true. High transaction fees is the real issue and others would follow.

And actually, I would say Bitcoin has its requirements set before you can enter. Having access to this is a must to acquire that is devices which you need to connect to the internet though even if it is available the problem lies in your financial status though even if you can afford it the thing is you need to know how to cope up and understand the complexity even just the basic ones that are needed. As the OP stated that poverty really can hinder and also education but nonetheless maybe Africa has another thing up in its sleeves.

[satoshforever]

People keep forgetting that Bitcoin isn't currently good for micropayments. Hopefully future advances (Lightning Network etc) will improve this

[RamBahadur.Gurung]

People keep forgetting that Bitcoin isn't currently good for micropayments. Hopefully future advances (Lightning Network etc) will improve this

Things can change. If they increase the blocksize and reduce the transaction fee, then it may still be possible to use Bitcoins for micro-payments (although the miners will remain dead opposed to this idea).

[yakushev]

People keep forgetting that Bitcoin isn't currently good for micropayments. Hopefully future advances (Lightning Network etc) will improve this

Things can change. If they increase the blocksize and reduce the transaction fee, then it may still be possible to use Bitcoins for micro-payments (although the miners will remain dead opposed to this idea).

No one can guess how events will develop. But I am sure that Africa is still very far from bitcoin. There is no technical opportunity to use bitcoin. Only large cities are developed where there are tourists

[FasTroy]

The price of Bitcoin doesn't matter. Transaction fees do.
High transaction fees kill micropayments and that rules out Bitcoin from poor countries.

I agree with you, There is no problem about bitcoin price, The only problem is on fees. We will wait until they will fixed and lowered a bit. Anyways nowadays we saw that fees fall and now is:
The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 300 satoshis/byte.
For the median transaction size of 226 bytes, this results in a fee of 67,800 satoshis.
According to https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

I think when the fees volatility will be in this marge of ~300 satoshis/byte is not bad and no matter at all even in Africa, exactly for poor countries.

[bitbunnny]

For poor countries like Africa the problem is in high fees even for small or micro transactions but not only that. There are still many people who lack education, Internet access and familiarity with new technologies so in percentage very small number of people in poor countries have access to bitcoin. And if we want for Bitcoin to change their.life and help them this issues should be solved first.

[pixie85]

Africa isn't even ready for smartphones. I'm talking about central Africa here because the North and South are fairly developed. Read about the things that are going on in there. Kids running around with guns, pirates attacking transport ships in their little wooden boats. Bitcoin isn't going to change anything for them.

[Vohoanghiep]

       Bitcoins is fast growing with a purpose of becoming the worldwide currency. Daily, thousands of people are joining this movement and within the next decade if not sooner bitcoins would have taken over, but what will this mean for Africa? For a continent quite far behind (I don’t want to go through all the reasons why) but let’s face it we just aren’t ready for this revolution and here are my reasons;
TECHNOLOGY
Smartphones to be particular, have increased to almost a double with figures of about 226 million over the past two years in Africa mainly due to the drop in prices from $230 in 2012 to $160 in 2015 according to a report published by GSMA on Africa’s mobile economy. This seems a good thing right? Well maybe, maybe not for a continent of 1.216 billion people this means only about 18% of Africans own a smartphone. Our hopes now rest entirely on how fast the rate of smartphones will increase to how fast the world is taking in Bitcoins.
POVERTY
I honestly didn’t want to include this but Bit coins is a system dependent on money that is buying one to trade for one, and yes poverty is a worldwide epidemic but its rate is much higher in Africa considering the bitcoin worth is rising every coming day taking huge giant strides further away from us only benefiting the rich.
LEADERS
African leaders.....well lets just say for a system against corruption, I don’t think at least not now.

In Africa, people are so inadequate that they have too many physical conditions, and few people have access to internet access. The level of knowledge and education is not high, leading to delays in developing countries, which makes them poor. So they have no money to invest in Bitcoin. In addition, transaction fees will lose the small amount of money they earn. So I think Africa is not ready for Bitcoin

[Rhosadah]

They are not ready because there are some reasons one of them is the education resources in the African region is still far said equivalent or equalized, so knowledge of the internet world, smartphone is still practically minimal or only for upper middle class only, maybe in the next era I think Africa will get a decent place in this world and become a very established and advanced country

[jak3]

I am sure everyone has talked with African people they always talk about money. I think if they get a bit of guidance and some support then a system like bitcoin can be very important and very helpful for them. if we ignore the fact that every human has rights to get what they truly needed then ya Africa isn't ready at all. I also believe they still can get bitcoin working in their country without anyone's help. In addition to that mostly of Africa is high crime region and wild life region. so it is a lot harder for them to adopt any new system specially related to money.

[EthBooks]

Bitcoin is already very popular in certain African countries like Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Morocoo and Algeria. It's only a matter of time before it explodes. Internet penetration is on the increase and with the introduction of fibre optic, things will get better.

[d5000]

I disagree with your overly pessimistic view, and I think you are generalizing too much - Africa is large, as some already have said.

Smartphones to be particular, have increased to almost a double with figures of about 226 million [...] Well maybe, maybe not for a continent of 1.216 billion people this means only about 18% of Africans own a smartphone.

That is at least one person per family - in urban areas I would say more. And some more advanced "feature phones" for less than 50 dollars already run Android and so are able to run a Bitcoin wallet.

poverty is a worldwide epidemic but its rate is much higher in Africa considering the bitcoin worth is rising every coming day taking huge giant strides further away from us only benefiting the rich.

There is some truth in that, above all if we observe the epidemy of pyramid schemes that are popular in countries like Nigeria and are doing more harm than good using Bitcoin as a vehicle. But that can change - I can imagine many services, from online education to "banking for the unbanked" and even online medicine, that could benefit from Bitcoin as an easy means of payment. The problem left is volatility, and here I think really people should think about solutions (like an insurance system against crashes).

African leaders.....well lets just say for a system against corruption, I don’t think at least not now.

There are African leaders/governments that are less corrupt than our leaders in South America,  and here Bitcoin is doing pretty well. Bitcoin enterpreneurs are not obliged to choose the worst countries (e.g. Somalia, Zimbabwe or the DR Congo). They can start in stable, relatively well governed countries like Ghana or Senegal.

[Blackwhite69]

They might not be ready for it now, but a wave is coming for them and they will leap into the technological world and many people will regret they ignored Africa for so long in terms of they're going to provide so many opportunities for growth in the fields of renewable energy and modern technology.

That right, for now maybe they are not ready but not tomorrow and many people will regret they ignored Africa for so long in terms of they're going to provide so many opportunities for growth in the fields of modern technology.

[stompix]

Smartphone penetration is quite good in many of the Africa countries, and a number of Bitcoin ventures originated from there. I can see a lot of potential for Bitcoin in Africa. The M-Pesa/Bitcoin collaboration was quite successful in Tanzania and Kenya. There were a few other startups which dealt in Bitcoin as well. But one thing which is going to affect the popularity of the Bitcoin is the high fees.

I don't know what happened to that tie-up, but I have seen posts from African users claiming that it is no longer working well. What happened with M-Pesa was a big disappointment. Because Bitcoin usage would have been very beneficial to the Africans, especially for small-scale trade and remittance. I heard that it is quite hard there to open bank accounts.

How about you make your mind?
Was it a success and two minute later a disappointment? Then stop with the shitposting.

They might not be ready for it now, but a wave is coming for them and they will leap into the technological world and many people will regret they ignored Africa for so long in terms of they're going to provide so many opportunities for growth in the fields of renewable energy and modern technology.

That right, for now maybe they are not ready but not tomorrow and many people will regret they ignored Africa for so long in terms of they're going to provide so many opportunities for growth in the fields of modern technology.

Hahahah, I've heard that so many times in the last decade it's not even funny anymore.
What have people in Africa managed to do?

Bring down one single country that was at the level of western countries (South Africa) and transform it in a crime ridden, hiv infected landfill of a dump.

This is the reality of Africa:
https://youtu.be/A0C4_88ub_M?t=4359

[HarleyQuinn9876]

Africa is not ready to use bitcoin. Because most African countries are poor countries. The majority of the population is not exposed to technology. Most payments are small amounts. Trading is very difficult. Bitcoin will hardly grow there

[chixka000]

Maybe not now yes it is true. However if africa tries to atleast adopt this would let their economy grow. We know that there are smart africans if they invest of trading they can actually do it