> The dollar volume of crypto received by users in Nigeria in May was $2.4bn, up from $684m last December, according to blockchain research firm Chainalysis. And the true scale of crypto flows through Africa’s largest economy is likely to be much larger, with many trades untraceable by analysts.
Over $2.4bn in value transferred, but you're telling me no one is using it? Transfer in BTC and convert to a stable coin if you're worried about volatility. Also Nigeria's currency, the naira has a 12% inflation rate. I'm not sure holding BTC is more of a risk than a currency that's guaranteed to lose 12% of its value each year.
A VPN will not protect you if PayPal decides to freeze your account. It will also not hide any of your transactions from PayPal.
Nothing hints at a usage "as a currency" from Nigerian users.
Most likely, those are scammers of other illegal activities and they hoard as much as possible of BTC without really caring how much exactly it amounts to.
Also Nigeria is not an oppressive regime.
Edited: ok it's oppressive.
However it's still somehow a democracy (with all the constraints of an islamic democracy).
PayPal has competitors, so they will be more than happy to take you as a customer if PayPal banned you.
Read the article linked above and I think it will be difficult to resist the conclusion that Nigeria is an oppressive regime. There's even a wikipedia page dedicated to documenting human right abuses in Nigeria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Nigeria
> Last October, Nigeria was rocked by the largest protests in decades, as many thousands marched against police brutality, and the infamous Sars police unit. The “EndSars” protests saw abuses by security forces, who beat demonstrators, and used water cannon and teargas on them. More than 50 protesters were killed, at least 12 of them shot dead at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos on 20 October
> The clampdown was financial too. Civil society organisations, protest groups and individuals in favour of the demonstrations who were raising funds to free protesters or supply demonstrators with first aid and food had their bank accounts suddenly suspended.
> Feminist Coalition, a collective of 13 young women founded during the demonstrations, came to national attention as they raised funds for protest groups and supported demonstration efforts. When the women’s accounts were also suspended, the group began taking bitcoin donations, eventually raising $150,000 for its fighting fund through cryptocurrency.
> Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and a prominent advocate of cryptocurrencies, reshared the FemCo bitcoin donation page, further drawing the ire of Nigeria’s government, which last month suspended Twitter in Nigeria.
I edited my comment though to reflect that, yes they are oppressive as they do shadowy things with the police and kill people. There is probably a mix of maybe-unregrettable (killing dangerous religious extremists political opponents) and regrettable (killing anti-islam feminists) events.
Nigeria is an extremely violent society. Think Mexico.
So police violence, if regrettable, is pretty much a corollary.
Sorry but it does not seem weird to you, that among all the dictatorships on Earth, only the scammers' paradise Nigeria has adopted cryptocurrencies at a large scale? Why not Cuba?
About feminist activism: okay but then what about in other muslim countries, where the problem is similar? Why is it in Nigeria that the adoption is so big?
My point is that these citizen organizations could have just used VPN+PayPal very easily for their activism, but it's because BTC was already mainstream among the omnipresent scam businesses, that they had the idea to try.
It doesn't matter if you use VPN with your paypal account, you can still be locked out of your account and your funds frozen. This is not true of bitcoin. No one can freeze your bitcoin, no one can prevent transfer.
The usage by Cubans is completely dwarfed by the one by Nigerians. The population size can probably explain it partly, but I don't think it's sufficient.
But most people depend on platforms to use BTC, so it's the same problem as with PayPal.
Also when I say PayPal, think "all PayPal-like services", including all the competitors.
In the cases where users were banned, PayPal did not prevent them from migrating their funds to others forms, so it's not really freezing.
Let's take China instead of Cuba because there are more data. In January 2021, Nigeria made 32% of BTC exchanges, whereas China only 7%. That shows you there is really some effect independent from the population size and from the nature of the political regime.
I put it bluntly sorry, but to be more explicit:
because of its volatility, BTC is very difficult to adopt for real transactions.
Also, with a simple VPN, you access PayPal and you're good to go.
I'd argue that the real tech saving the world right now is the VPN.
Even to use BTC somehow you will need VPN, because those dictatorships will block the IPs.