Banking on Africa: The Bitcoin Revolution

How you feeling?

Very excited.

Making history.

And also, there's gonna be a lot

of very pleased people at the school.

It's not just a tech thing.

It's not just a new invention.

It's something that can actually help real people.

So, it's fun to do that and exciting.

It gives it all meaning, not just interest.

Living at the bottom of Africa

can really make world affairs feel like things

that just happen somewhere else.

So in 2014, when I heard the word Bitcoin for the first time

I made it my mission to find out

what is so wrong with the way things are

that people are trying

to change the financial system for everyone.

The thing about storytelling though,

the story you expect is never the one you find.

I reached out to friends to find out

who knew about this thing called Bitcoin

and I was pointed in the direction of Lorien Gamaroff.

Within four minutes of receiving my email

about being interviewed on Bitcoin,

Lorien responded, saying,

"Yes, I do believe that this will impact our lives

"as much as the internet has done."

So can you first explain to me what cryptocurrency is?

- All it is, essentially, is a mechanism for being able

to transfer digital assets without there having

to be a duplicate of that digital asset.

I'll give you an example.

If you have an MP3, or a digital photo,

it's very easy to make a copy of that digital photo or MP3

and send it to multiple friends,

or what this term is called, double spend.

In 2008, an anonymous developer, or engineer,

or financial guru devised a way

to create a digital currency,

which essentially solved that problem,

where you could create a digital asset

that could be transferred from entity to another

and couldn't be easily copied.

In 2011, I read a blog about an underground website

that was using this new internet currency that was different

from any other currency that had ever come before it,

and I immediately decided to try and play around with it

and see where it would go, and acquired a number of them,

when they were worth very little.

And then, over the years I've just seen the usage explode

and people come around to the idea

that this could very will be the next innovation

that disrupts and upturns our lives,

and has a massive positive impact.

There are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there

and they're quite diverse in terms

of what their intentions are

and what they were designed to do.

So, for me the discussion begins with Bitcoin.

It's the the proto cryptocurrency.

It's the first one that mattered.

When you first geek out about Bitcoin,

and blockchain, and cryptocurrency,

you tend to become very excited about the tech itself,

and I think I made the mistake quite a few times early on

of getting too technical when I'm just speaking

to my mum, or my wife, or friends

who just want to understand how it works.

It's digital money.

- In 2016, we attended the Bitcoin

and Blockchain Africa Conference,

so we could hear people who get it, explain it.

There was a woman on stage from Botswana who educates people

on both the potential and risks of Bitcoin.

After she shared her personal story,

I snuck over and slipped a piece of paper into her hand

with the hastily scrawled words,

I'm making a documentary and I would love to interview you.

Come, come, come.

Welcome to my farm.

This is a very small farm that I started in 2017,

when the Bitcoin market went a bit up.

I managed to buy the goats

and I bought myself some chickens,

and I set up the farm.

And I also managed to buy myself this car.

That is why it has got all these Bitcoin stickers.

You can come and check out my goats.

They are like way cool.

The other ones are not yet here.

I think they're still in the bush.

The humble beginnings.

I'm hoping in the future

I'll have much, much wider farm

as I continue in my journey of Bitcoin.

So this is a Bitcoin farm.

But instead of mining Bitcoin, I'm mining goats.

The piece of land, I got it in 2011,

so from 2011 until 2017 there was nothing happening.

I couldn't clean it up because I didn't have money.

Some of my goats are coming.

It's one of my passions

besides teaching people about Bitcoin.

My husband is the one who is always coming here

most of the time

because as for me, I'm always busy doing my education

and doing my Satoshi Centre, and sometimes touring.

People have flooded Africa with a lot of scams

and a lot of our people are falling into those scams.

So I'm not basically only focused on Botswana.

Where education is needed, I go.

The whole idea of the farm

is so that I can be able to sustain myself.

I'm just educating people

without making any profit out of it.

For me, education is very important

even though I get stressed

when my life is not working according to plan,

and my vision for the Satoshi Centre

is not really accomplished, I would say,

but I'm always grateful for the Bitcoin community

because they are really a super, amazing family.

Everyone in the Bitcoin space, they're amazing.

The original document

that outlined the vision to reinvent the world of finance

and technology was released in 2008

against the backdrop of the financial crisis.

In order to understand all of that,

the most obvious place to start was money.

What is money?

Where did it come from?

And why isn't the way it works working for us anymore?

One of the first things we figured out to do

that really distinguished us

from the other animals on this planet was invent language

and a way of communicating with each other

that could convey very complicated ideas.

We could have armies of 100s or 1000s of individuals,

where other great apes would only be able

to organize in clusters of up to about 100 individuals.

So, that gave us an edge.

Language was extremely powerful as an organizing mechanism,

but the thing we needed next was a way

of making our trust in each other portable.

We used seashells.

Baboon bones were a popular form of currency in Africa,

but money is, and always has been, a form of an IOU note.

I could give you something and you could trust that

that thing had value because society believed it did.

Things like dollars and rands, we call those fiat currencies

and fiat is a Latin word that means 'let it be done'.

It basically means that they have value

because governments say they do.

Governments tell us that you will use this money.

You will accept it as repayment of debt

and you will pay your taxes in this currency.

So, it really is just is because we say so.

There was a period where fiat currencies

were backed by the gold standard,

and now really money is just backed

by a government's ability to enforce taxation

within its borders.

Governments, or their central banking authorities,

can print as much money as they want to.

The decision to print money

is something that lies with a few individuals.

It's open to flawed decision making and really it's fair

to say that fiat money isn't backed by anything.

For a time, Bitcoin felt like a lot of talk

and very little action,

but Lorien was taking Bitcoin out of academia,

out of the future,

and creating a real world use for it in 2015,

something tangible for the world to see.

If you consume electricity,

you're gonna have a meter installed at your property.

There's two modes that that meter can be in,

either postpaid or prepaid.

Postpaid is where you just consume the utility

and at the end of the month somebody will come

and read your meter and then send you a bill

and then you pay.

You're consuming first and then you pay.

Now prepaid meters are trying to solve the problem

where people are consuming and then not paying,

which is a problem we have, and it's showing itself

in our energy provider, Eskom, where they say

they don't have enough money to maintain the power stations

because they can't recover from the municipalities.

The municipalities can't recover

because nobody wants to pay for the utility.

They've already consumed it.

So, they're trying to close that gap

by switching all their customers on to prepaid,

so they can't consume unless they've paid.

But it then introduces another problem

from a consumer's point of view.

At least 80% of Africans are unbanked.

If they want to make a payment they have to use cash.