Why Fiscally Empowering the Third World is Blockchain’s Ne Plus Ultra
The July sun beats down on Achike Okafor’s back as he boards a bus leaving the small town where he has been working for the last nine months at an oil refinery. The bus will take him nine hours across Nigeria’s poverty-stricken countryside to Lagos where he will see his family for the first time since starting work at the refinery late last year. The largest city in Africa, Lagos is an expansive port town of 14 million people. Like most major hubs in the developing world, Lagos is a model of economic inequality. The juxtaposition of crippling poverty and opulence is striking and unyielding.
Achike, a bald, middle-aged Nigerian man is dripping sweat as he pulls his two bags onto the bus. The temperature has long since blown past the torturous landmark of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In his left hand, Achike clutches a bag with clothing and a few other essentials. In his right, he holds a potato sack filled with 500,000 Nigerian nairas (about 1,500 USD) constituting the fruits of nine months’ labor; all the money he has to support his wife and two young daughters for the next year. Unbeknownst to the rest of the bus, Achike is also harboring another piece of luggage, a 4-inch stainless steel blade tucked inside his waistband to fend off any would-be bandits who might try to rob him of his hard-earned cash.
Riding a New York subway Achike would seem like a criminal carrying a bag of cash and a knife the size of his forearm. But this is merely routine for Achike and millions of other manual laborers in Africa willing to literally risk their lives to avoid devastating 10–20% remittance fees standard for all domestic transfers. The high fees, and sloth-like service, often taking upwards of two weeks to process is more than most workers can handle given they are already faced with some of the lowest wages in the world (Nigeria ranked 171st in the world in purchasing power parity adjusted per capita GDP as of 2010).
On the surface, Achike Okafor and his sack of cash on an overheated bus suggest little connection to Bitcoin and the typically wealthy, libertarian community it attracts. But it is Bitcoin, and the revolutionary technology that enables it, that conceivably holds the key to unlocking financial freedom for Achike and billions like him around the world.
This technology, known as the “blockchain” is fundamentally disruptive in a way we have not seen since Tim Berners Lee and the World Wide Web.
Blockchain was first introduced by an ingenious, and fascinatingly still anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto (a pseudonym) published in late 2008 a white paper titled “A Peer-to- Peer Electronic Cash System” (I.e. Bitcoin). Bitcoin, a virtual currency, was the first successful large-scale implementation of blockchain technology as a decentralized ledger system.
For the first time in human history, your friend Alice can send money directly to Bob, who might be a complete stranger, anywhere in the world almost instantly.
In other words, no centralized clearing house or bank is necessary to handle the transfer. Instead, trust is ensured by the Bitcoin network and its mathematically robust transaction approval process known as proof-of-work.
Generally speaking, centralized financial authorities serve three essential functions. In order to disinter-mediate value transfer, Bitcoin needed to replace these essential functions while maintaining the same or better fiduciary robustness we expect from legacy institutions. These three functions are outlined as follows:
- Ensuring Alice does not send the same Bitcoin she sends to Bob to another person simultaneously (known as “the double spend” problem)
- Verifying Alice has enough in her account to send a Bitcoin to Bob.
- Updating Alice’s account to have one less Bitcoin and while adding one Bitcoin to Bob’s balance.
With a bank, you not only relinquish your financial agency by placing complete trust in the bank which can cause problems (see: Bank of Bangladesh), but the human capital required to operate a bank isn’t free and so significant fees can accrue. You also face a wait of days or weeks before any transfer you initiate is completed. The blockchain, on the other hand, allows peer-to-peer money transfer with zero trust between parties, it ensures that there is no possibility for transaction reversal, and it moves quickly, so money isn't be locked up for long periods of time all while paying negligible fees.
With Bitcoin, each member of the network receives a copy of all the Bitcoin trades ever made, made up of a series of connected, time ordered blocks filled with transactions (i.e. the “blockchain”). Computationally endowed network verifiers (called miners) solve cryptographically randomized puzzles to ensure the validity of those transactions.
Bringing back the comparison to the Internet, the World Wide Web greatly changed how information got distributed. Throwing the information highway wide open meant equal access to information and created opportunity for social and economic mobility, particularly among the middle class. Blockchain takes the next step in changing the financial system; most immediately by leveling the barriers to entry in the banking system and expanding opportunity for low-income unbanked workers like Achike.
The potential effects of a paradigm shift of this magnitude on the banking system, and beyond, is difficult to overstate. Even in the affluent United States, 27.7% of households are either unbanked or under-banked according to national survey results published in 2013 by the FDIC. In other words, 34.4 million households in the U.S. either have no bank account at all or have an account but don’t use it, typically because they can’t afford too. The numbers are even more severe in the developing world where there are nearly 2.2 billion unbanked adults in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East according to a 2010 McKinsey report, the largest and most comprehensive recent analysis of its kind. These numbers substantiate Achike’s nine hour, sweltering — knife wielding bus ride as a scarily accurate archetype of the financial privation faced by the working class in the developing world.
BitPesa, a payment startup, has developed a platform leveraging bitcoin and blockchain to enable low-cost remittance and business services in Africa. With BitPesa, you can use your mobile device to send payments directly to mobile money accounts over the bitcoin network, bypassing expensive legacy remittance networks. The service importantly lets users buy and sell local African currencies as well as exchange them for other global currencies with near instant settlement times at very low fees. The company is focusing on Nigeria as the primary growth market with Kenya and Uganda also included in the initial rollout. With any luck, Achike will no longer have to risk carrying his hard earned cash by hand back to his family in Lagos. With BitPesa and the power of the blockchain, Achike will be able to take out his mobile phone and within minutes be confident in knowing the money is in the hands of his family.
Given the imbroglio that is the regulatory framework of the inter-African financial system, smooth integration and seamless adoption of innovative financial services like BitPesa is far from a simple task. However, African central banks are appearing to warm to the idea of digital currencies as evidenced by Senegal which recently launched an initiative to become the first country to release a cryptocurrency based on its national currency.
There is no question that Nakamoto’s technology is incredibly groundbreaking, but it comes at a cost. Some estimates, like one put out by the Hamilton Institute of the National University of Ireland, compares the energy cost of the Bitcoin network to the energy consumption of all of Ireland. Another figure, calculated by technology journalist Chistopher Malmo, pegged the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction as equal to the daily energy usage of 1.57 U.S. households. This raises serious environmental questions about the scalability of Bitcoin-style blockchains and whether one could ever come close to supporting the transactional demands of a national bank, let alone the entire global financial system.
Fortunately, Bitcoin and blockchain technology is not inherently energy intensive. There are ways to significantly limit the environmental impact of the consensus process. Blockstream, one of the largest contributors to the Bitcoin code base, is working to expand Bitcoins scalability by developing a solution known as the Bitcoin Lighting Network. What the lighting network aims to do is provide a mechanism where the vast majority of bitcoin transactions would occur off the main Bitcoin blockchain limiting the need for energy-intensive mining. The main idea is that many transactions are highly related and can take place instantly on micropayment channels with only the final settlement kicked back to the main Bitcoin blockchain for cryptographic validation.
Just like the Internet 25 years ago, Blockchain is a technology that is confusing, requires more than 10 minutes to explain and is surrounded in a haze of technical jargon complicating the laypersons' ability to fully grasp its implications. The Internet quickly shed this enigmatic status because of its sheer usefulness and the transformative impact it had on the world. It is important to recognize the possibility that blockchain, with all its early limitations, has the potential to be as powerful a disruptive force in the next two decades as the Internet has been in the last two.
Blythe Masters the CEO of Digital Asset Holding and a former JP Morgan executive put blockchains potential in even more definitive terms at a tech conference last year proclaiming that “you should pay attention to blockchain the way you should have paid attention to the Internet in the early 1990s”.