Diary of an African Cryptocurrency Miner
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
One is what proportion of ordinary people could actually get access to bitcoins in third world nations.
Another is whether bitcoin mining will wind-up being a way to launder money and access to energy in the third world - we often hear about oil, diamonds and minerals being taken during conflicts in third world nations. If someone could turn oil into wealth with nothing more than an Internet connection and a portable server-farm, a whole range of abuses might be possible. It's been claim bitcoin mining in China can be a way to subvert currency controls already.
I don’t know about truly impoverished countries of Africa, but I have seen more Bitcoin storefronts and Bitcoin kiosks in South America and Eastern Europe than in wealthier countries of North America or Western Europe.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Sub-Saharan Africa was very quick to adopt mobile payments. The countries may be poor, but millions of people may have phones even if they don’t have electricity or running water in their homes, and they are able to do a lot with those phones.
Bottom line: people are creative creatures. Either we have some rules we can all agree on and enforce them, or people will start inventing all sort of, erm, market optimizations techniques to survive and prosper.
BTC is not helping much in Venezuela. basic goods are hyperinflated in both local currency, USD and BTC.
it's just that by looking at people who happens to own USD or BTC in the feel-good articles we have from there on this topic, they can afford much more than others because of better economic situation before the crisis.
BTC is not helping Venezuela since there is a state induced apocalypse going on. No currency can help with that.
With less extreme inflationary events, like bad monetary policy, that do not destroy all supply chains, currencies like BTC should be able to help retain wealth.
I'd like to point out such problems can be easily manufactured if some points in the supply chain are heavily concentrated.
As long as imports are allowed (or at least there is a black market), importers should be willing to sell for at USD and BTC, so in theory USD and BTC are still better than local currency.
0) One for plausible deniability. You give this one away whilst under extreme pressure (torture).
1) For small expenses. This key you know yourself, in your head. Don't mix it up with #0. You could merge #0 and #1 if you feel relatively safe.
2) Savings. This key you give to multiple escrows.
What fraction of people in those places have access to reliable computing, connectivity and electricity?
THERE are currently 960 million mobile subscriptions across Africa - an 80 percent penetration rate among the continent's population. Internet penetration is at 18 percent with 216 million internet users, according to the latest Jumia mobile trend report for Africa.
I don't know if mobile subscription includes data but you have Wifi at cafes and such.
Of course it is a questionable medium to speculating in, since there is no real mechanism holding the ICO-offerer to any obligation to deliver what they say they will deliver.
At least with a traditional stock market that is slightly more regulated, transparent, etc, we can reasonably expect that everyone from Apple to Zapos will attempt to deliver on what they say they will, with theoretical criminal charges being the price to pay for those who deliberately defraud investors.
According [1] a 1080 Ti can produce about 675 hashes a second for Zcash. Using [2] we can see that one card would net him about $2.5 per day. For six cards we get ~$450 per month which is enough to pay his electricity bill and probably internet costs.
The graphic cards are quite costly and the payback time for the card thus pretty long.
[1] http://zcashbenchmarks.info/ [2] https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/zec?HashingP...
From the little know I have not seen mining via Wi-Fi. I know of a country where everybody is using Wi-Fi, is it possible to mine in such a place?
So could mining an altcoin offer higher returns? I'm skeptical because if a coin is too profitable, people will mine the crap out of it and then dump it, sending the price plunging.
Since June, most alt coins have lagged bitcoin..there are simply too many of them and no differentiation. With very few exceptions, anything an altcoin does so does bitcoin.
It's also not really true that Bitcoin does everything that altcoins do. It's just that most of what altcoins try doesn't seem to matter much in the market, with obvious exceptions for stronger anonymity (xmr, zec) or smart contracts (eth).
Of course, there is massive variability as Africa is huge and diverse. But the entire continent has more expensive power than say, Germany, or something.
Also, stuff that is human powered (food, tailoring, etc.) are much cheaper. Again, lots of variability, but food in Ghana is going to be cheaper than food in say, Germany, or the US. Although you can certainly get expensive stuff in some areas (SA, TZ, etc.).
Meanwhile, US mobile data prices are some of the highest in the world. I spend ~$40 month in the US for 2GB of data (before getting capped to low speeds). The last time I was in Kenya, 1GB ran about $4-5, so about 1/5 the price of my US plan. India (post-JIO) is ludicrously cheap right now: I just today got a 1GB/day 28-day plan for ~$5.
But, of course, all of this depends on income as well. The Kenyan data tends to be more expensive for everyday people because they buy it in rather smaller increments than 1GB (250MB or even 100MB at a time), which end up being more expensive per unit.
Here's some data comparing monthly mobile phone costs across the world, with various kinds of normalization, for your perusal: http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/where-are-cheapest-and-m...
It depends on what you do. You could mine today and sell a couple of years from now, profit margins (and losses) are usually only established when something is sold. Of course that leaves you open to a potential downside as well.
And so therefore everyone that mined and sold had a lower return?
multipool mining has been around for like 5 years
A much easier way to convert capital into cryptocurrency is simply to buy cryptocurrency.
It's not limited to Africa though. I'm from New Zealand, and I've had Europeans ask if I visit Japan a lot, because I'm so close (I'm about as close to Japan as Germany is). I've had Americans ask if I was ok when they heard news that tropical cyclones were hitting Queensland (I'm as far from Queensland as a Jamaican is from Ohio). And the hemisphere thing stumps so many people. Usually they just constantly forget that the seasons are reversed, but I've had one educated, multilingual gentleman from east Asia ask me if North and South mean the same thing in the southern hemisphere, or if they have opposite meanings.
To your point, I could probably name most African countries but not place them exactly from memory, particularly in the interior and on the western coast. Niger is hot news in the U.S. right now, and we had a week or so of everyone collectively figuring out not only that it’s distinct from Nigeria but also proper pronunciation, simply because we don’t think about Africa much (which is lame, I agree). Legislators were surprised we had troops in Niger, which should really say a lot.
Geography education is already iffy in a number of places, and I imagine ubiquitous digital maps are going to exacerbate that problem the same way we are already losing the ability to memorize phone numbers. John Oliver has been having fun with this by highlighting the wrong country as a recurring gag on his show.