By Bitcoin Magasin - 2 år sedan - Lästid: 9 minuter
Som den omfamnar Bitcoin, Nigeria erbjuder lektioner till utvecklingsvärlden
As Bitcoin becomes more widely accepted in Nigeria, the country offers lessons in self-custody practices for Bitcoiners in developing nations.
Casa var nyligen värd för en virtuell konferens, Keyfest, during which Peter McCormack of the “What Bitcoin Did” podcast hosted a conversation with Obi Nwosu, the cofounder of U.K.-based bitcoin exchange Coinfloor, and Nick Neuman, the CEO of Casa. They discussed the future Bitcoin, specifically in the context of developing world nations, such as Nigeria.
El Salvador really took the spotlight through 2021 in terms of Bitcoin adoption in developing nations. The lagligt betalningsmedel and the scale at which things were rolled out in response to that legislation were truly historical and at a scale unlike anything that has happened in the history of Bitcoin. There has never been a top-down directed adoption of Bitcoin så här någon annanstans i världen och oavsett vilka hicka som har hänt längs vägen hittills, eller eventuella fallgropar som fortfarande kan ligga framför, är detta en utveckling för historieböckerna.
Men det är inte det enda exemplet på storskalig adoption som förekommer i världen idag. Ett annat exempel från den andra änden av spektrumet - en organisk tillväxt i motsats till top-down, statligt styrd - sker i Nigeria i Västafrika.
Nigeria’s Growing Bitcoin Accept
As told by Nwosu during the Keyfest panel, most people in the country did not have a positive view of Bitcoin at all. In fact, many had quite a negative perception. Initially, most Nigerians associated Bitcoin with internet ponzi schemes such as OneCoin, Bitconnect and the like. These types of scams and ponzis are rife in Nigeria, and as Bitcoin continued growing in size and value, it became more frequent for it to be used as the requested mechanism for scammer's victims to send payments. There was no real conception, according to Nwosu, that Bitcoin was something independent of and unrelated to the scams people fell victim to, they simply viewed it as another facet of them.
Detta började förändras i kölvattnet av en populär våg av protester 2020 (även om rörelsen bakom dem började 2017). I Nigeria fanns en specialenhet av poliser som hette Särskild anti-råntrupp (SARS) i uppdrag att specialisera verkställighet och utredning för att bekämpa rån, bilkapning, kidnappning och vapenbrott. Enheten bildades 1992 och har en lång historia av kopplingar till utomrättsliga mord, försvinnande människor, utpressning och tortyr.
Protests against this police unit gained wide popularity in October 2020 and after a short period, banks in Nigeria shut down the accounts of protestor aid groups and began preventing them from accepting donations in support of the movement. This led to these groups looking to Bitcoin to accept donations, and after this successfully led to international support for the protestors, this moment planted the seeds of the attitude toward Bitcoin in Nigeria slowly shifting in a positive direction.
I början av 2021 som svar på denna förändring, samt en massiv minskning av remitteringarna till Nigeria genom äldre räls minskade med nästan 30 % föregående år, den nigerianska centralbanken förbjöd banker i landet att interagera med kryptovalutaföretag. Despite this restriction, perhaps even because of it, the growth of Bitcoin in Nigeria has continued.
What Nigeria’s Bitcoin Acceptance Can Teach The World
Nigeria's ground-up growth in the face of systematic government opposition to the use of Bitcoin is an inspirational story and a very valuable case study in terms of Bitcoin's ability to thrive in an adversarial environment, but it also illuminates some of the unique obstacles for users in a developing country such as Nigeria.
Korruption är ett enormt problem i landet, as evidenced by the scandal surrounding the SARS police unit that instigated this massive public perception shift of Bitcoin in the first place. This introduces a lot of issues in terms of importing any kind of hardware device related to Bitcoin.
Anything coming into the country, which is essentially any hardware wallet that could be used to store bitcoin (because no major wallets are produced in Nigeria) must first pass through customs before getting into the hands of the user ordering it. This is a big potential risk to the user attempting to acquire a more secure mechanism for storing their coins.
It is very possible that customs agents could tamper with devices entering the country in a way that could lead to compromising people's bitcoin when the device is initialized and coins are sent to it. They could even completely replace the device with a malicious one.
De flesta tillverkare av hårdvaruplånbok vidtar vissa åtgärder för att paketera sina enheter på ett sådant sätt att sådana manipulationer blir uppenbara, men inte alla företags lösningar på detta problem är av samma kvalitet, och vissa tillverkare ägnar sig inte alls åt sådana metoder. Vissa tillverkare har flera lager av kontroller i förpackningen, såväl som kombinationer av kontroller på själva enheten. Vissa företag använder helt enkelt grundläggande manipuleringssäkra klistermärken som inte kan återförslutas efter öppning.
At the very least, it is possible for a customs agent to simply steal or confiscate the device and not let it into the country at all, thereby costing the person ordering it a non-trivial amount of money for nothing. This, combined with the fact that many people do not have much bitcoin in dollar terms, puts most Nigerians in a situation where a smartphone is their only viable option for self custody. It doesn't make economic sense to spend $100 on a hardware wallet when you only have maybe $100 to $200 dollars of bitcoin in the first place. It especially doesn't make sense to do so when considering all of the risks of acquiring such a wallet in the first place.
En annan faktor relaterad till dynamiken i självvård är helt enkelt ekonomin i att interagera med blockkedjan. Många nigerianer håller helt enkelt sina mynt på börser i förvaringsplånböcker på grund av enkelheten att hantera saker och ekonomin i att hantera sina egna transaktioner på kedja. Detta utgör en stor risk med den kommande vågen av FATF reseregel efterlevnad skvalpar över hela världen just nu. Länder som Estland har redan flyttat för att öka KYC-kraven i processen att implementera FATF:s reseregelpolicy i lagstiftningen, och det är mycket möjligt att andra länder kan följa ett liknande exempel under nästa år.
Om en sådan lag skulle antas i Nigeria skulle detta skapa en "digital apartheid", som Nwosu uttryckte det. Mynt som fastnat på förvaringsplattformar skulle bara vara användbara för att interagera med andra förvaringsplånböcker, med alla inblandade användares aktiviteter fullständigt övervakade och knutna till deras juridiska identiteter. Mynt som anonymt förvaltas av människor skulle börja existera som ett parallellt system, utan att kunna interagera med några förvaringstjänster. Detta är uppenbarligen inte bra, men det finns också potential för att detta kan vara en motiverande kick för att bygga ännu fler peer-to-peer-tjänster och infrastruktur som svar på en sådan händelse.
Givet att Bitcoin really started exploding in Nigeria because of the government cracking down on it, if such a restrictive move was to create a positive outcome in the long-term anywhere, I think it would be somewhere like Nigeria.
One potential solution to prevent Nigerians from being trapped in such an FATF digital apartheid system is something that has existed in one form of another for years now: collaborative custody. Multisig is an extremely powerful tool that Bitcoin provides to people, and when looking at the two major problems outlined above that present themselves for Nigerians securely custodying their own bitcoin, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for them.
A smartphone can be a very dangerous storage mechanism for someone's bitcoin, but combined with multisig and a friend or family member's device, the security of a smartphone wallet can be dramatically improved. This could enable families and groups of friends to collaboratively manage their bitcoin holdings in a way that would not expose everyone's bitcoin to a single point of failure when self custodying.
To take things a step further, although not necessarily alleviating the supply chain and customs risks, collaboratively custodying funds in a group using multisig can also alleviate to a degree the costs of purchasing a hardware wallet in relation to the value of the bitcoin you are securing. It might not make economic sense to spend $100 on a hardware device to secure a few hundred dollars worth of bitcoin, but if you get a close group of 10 to 15 friends and family members together who collectively might own a few thousand dollars of bitcoin, spending a few hundred on hardware devices to manage that bitcoin more securely might make sense.
Working together in communities as opposed to independently as an individual, as much as this might sound against the principals of Bitcoin to Westerners, allows people in a country like Nigeria to overcome the barriers of using Bitcoin in a self sovereign way that result from the inescapable costs of interacting with the blockchain directly. And to boot, it actually synergizes very well with the traditional African culture of relying heavily on family and friends to deal with things in life. In a culture based heavily around tight-knit communities looking after each other, this model of interacting with Bitcoin är vettigt.
Coming back to El Salvador again momentarily, El Zonte has actually pioneered exactly this type of Bitcoin model to the extreme. The Galoy Bitcoin plånbok that the town uses is actually a custodial community bank backed by a multisig vault run by trusted members in the community. A town of 3,000 people have been successfully using such a community Bitcoin Bank for years.
Det stämmer, 3,000 XNUMX personer. Nu, det kanske inte är en livskraftig förtroendemodell i något som en större stad, med mycket mer opersonliga kopplingar över större sociala grupper, men det här är en demonstration av hur mycket en sådan kollaborativ vårdnadsmodell kan skalas när det finns den snäva sociala sammankopplingen mellan människor. De flesta av de medel som banken innehar lagras i en multisig-plånbok i kedjan, med en liten mängd pengar online i Lightning-kanaler för att göra det möjligt för personer som använder Galoy-plånboken att göra transaktioner utanför kedjan med personer utanför gemenskapens bank. Det tillåter också uppenbarligen rena frihetsberövande överföringar mellan användare av Galoy.
This type of model is already implemented in Galoy, and could easily be implemented by local Bitcoiners in Nigeria. As well as Galoy, there are multiple other software suites that can accomplish the same set up. LND Hub implementerad av Blue Wallet, LNBits av Ben Arc och LN Bank currently being worked on by Dennis Reiman of BTCPay Server. All of these software projects allow an accounting system to be set up on top of a Lightning node and allow multiple users to transact using one node's channel. As long as there is a trusted operator or operators in a community or social circle to operate the node, anyone willing to trust them can have a cheap and cost effective way to transact using Bitcoin.
The reality of the developing world is that, given the average income of someone in a place like Nigeria, there are numerous economic barriers that make it very expensive in the long term to engage in self custody with the degree of security most Western Bitcoiners are accustomed to.
Without waiting for long-term price appreciation of bitcoin, people either have to settle for subpar security setups or leave things in the custody of a third party. The notion of a collaborative custody model affords people the option to participate directly in a multisig setup with other people and improve the security of funds that they maintain some degree of direct control over. Or, if that is not practical, to at least rely on a custodian that is a trusted family member or friend with a real social connection to them. That is an unbelievable improvement compared to a corporation with an impersonal relationship ultimately based around trying to find some way to make money off of a user as a customer.
Places like Nigeria are demonstrating that Bitcoin can indeed thrive in an environment where government's are being openly hostile to its existence. Outside of the box thinking along the lines of community banks and multisig collaborative custody can provide tools to people in such an environment which allow them to make more optimal tradeoffs between the security and utility of their interactions with Bitcoin. If people embrace them, Bitcoin has a very bright future ahead in places like Nigeria, and so will the people who use it.
Detta är ett gästinlägg av Shinobi. Åsikter som uttrycks är helt deras egna och återspeglar inte nödvändigtvis BTC Incs eller Bitcoin magazine.
Ursprunglig källa: Bitcoin magazine