The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna & Michael J. Casey

Author:Paul Vigna & Michael J. Casey [Vigna, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466873063
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-01-26T23:00:00+00:00

Eight

THE UNBANKED

Money, it has been said, is the cause of good things to a good man and of evil things to a bad man.

—Philo

Roughly 2.5 billion adults in the world don’t have access to banks, which means somewhere in the order of 5 billion people belong to households that are cut off from a financial system that the rest of us take for granted. They can’t start savings accounts. They don’t have checking accounts. They can’t get credit cards. They live in places where banks don’t want to go, and because of this, they remain effectively walled off from the global economy. They are called the unbanked. But they are not unreachable, not by a long shot, and one of the biggest and most exciting prospects bitcoiners talk about is using their cryptocurrency to bring these billions of people roaring into the twenty-first century.

Money is neither good nor bad. It is simply a system of exchange and accounting—a way for society to efficiently and effectively swap goods and services and to keep track of it all on a large scale. People have, nonetheless, invested it with transcendent values. “Money” has become as much a mental construct as “value” itself. Bitcoiners are no different in how they describe their currency. In their minds, bitcoin is a force unto itself that will reshape and improve people’s lives everywhere it goes, which leads them to this notion that they can both get rich and do tremendous good. It’s like capitalism with a radically altruistic bent. Nowhere is this more evident than in how bitcoin is being offered as a solution for the world’s poor—and in this case they do have a compelling case to make for a better, more widely accessible form of money.

To illustrate, let’s go back briefly to one of the start-ups that debuted at Plug and Play’s June expo day: 37Coins. The start-up is the combined work of its three founders, Songyi Lee, Johann Barbie, and Jonathan Zobro. Of the three, Lee seemed the most out of place in the Valley. Not a coder, nor a libertarian or crypto-anarchist, she was a social worker. Barbie, her boyfriend, was the techie and bitcoin enthusiast. But one day the two of them put their separate worlds together and realized they had a chance to do something big.

In September 2013, Lee was part of a film crew in Mali, working with the antipoverty nonprofit World Vision, on her first trip out in the field. Mali had just been through a brutal civil war, and people had emptied out of the north and fled for refugee camps in the south. There, Songyi met Fatima, a mother of five living in a “camp” that was more like a permanent residence. Her husband had immigrated to Ivory Coast for work, as so many Malians do, and would send money back when he could. How he did that made a huge impression on the young Lee.

Fatima’s husband sent money back though people. Random people, people who were headed in the direction of his wife and family.

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