My name is Alexandria “The Great”. I am a citizen of Zimbabwe and am in my second year of a bachelors degree at Liaoning Shuhua University in China. While studying Business Administration – I am also working two jobs within the Bitcoin community. The first is with Money On Chain where we are building Defi on Bitcoin for Bitcoiner’s in order to allow them to improve the performance of their Bitcoins whilst retaining full control of their private keys. The second one is Global Bitcoin Fest where we are the first and only Podcast/Twitter space to actually interview personalities from within the Bitcoin communities from all the countries.
My Bitcoin story begins at age 11 when I became one of the many millions of Zimbabweans to reach multi-trillionaire status. As awesome as this sounds – you really couldn’t imagine the lifestyle of a Multi-trillionaire in Zimbabwe at that time. Our lifestyle had many luxuries that included waking up as early as 02:00am in the morning to go and queue up for basic commodities outside retail outlets throughout the country. In most queues – one could wait for as long as six hours just to get essential products such as bread and water. Those that would queue up outside banks or ATM machines to make cash withdrawals would only be allowed local cash withdrawals that amounted to an equivalent of $2 US dollars and this was a daily allowance imposed on us by our own banks. You see – round about the year 2008 hyperinflation had reached a staggering 89.7 sextillion percent. This was quite the life of for many Trillionaires! Following this phase – we then had a few years of stability when the country dollarized. Sadly this didn’t last long as the government decided to go back to a local currency by introducing a Pseudo currency known as the “Bond Note”. It was rolled out as both paper money as well as electronic currency. The electronic version of it became known as the RTGS and could be used in interbank transfers as well as through the electronic wallet with the dominant e-wallet k known as Ecocash. This Bond note currency is not tendered in any other country. It can only be traded locally. To disincentivize foreign currency trading in the black market – the government introduced a 2% transaction fee on all payments and inter-account local account money transfers. This has since gone up to a total of about 6% transfer fees which include the 2% tax levy as well as bank charges.
Given the backdrop illustrated above as well as many other reasons not mentioned on this article – I believe that Zimbabwe, by far, has the greatest use case for Bitcoin.
Solution: My main goal through employment with Global Bitcoin Fest and Money On Chain is improving upon Bitcoin Scalability in Zimbabwe. By Creating the first Bitcoin Community that trades, collaborates and supports ourselves. I am also working with a few Bitcoiners on our first Bitcoin mining operation which will create local access to Bitcoin at the lowest possible cost ratio of 1:1 which may then allow the most affordable medium of exchange, and for Bitcoin to gain market share in terms of remittance payments and takeover from the Bottom up.
