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Comment by adim86 | Hacker News Reader

I live in Nigeria and this story is not being reported accurately. Back in 2017 the Central Bank asked banks to keep an eye out on people trading crypto and report suspicious activity. At the time there were many multi-level pyramid schemes running in the country and even one that included bitcoin in its name and the govt was clamping down on these issues and cryptocurrencies fell into that bucket

Come 2021 we are in a Bull run again and crypto action is high in the country. The govt sends this letter to banks again to keep an eye out.

This is not a Ban on Bitcoin or cryptocurrency it is shutting down the onramps of fiat into crypto. There are also other nuanced issues in the country about the Central bank needing people to hold the currency (Naira) due to heavy devaluation going on at the moment but lots of people are converting all their money to BTC and this is a way to halt it.

Hope this clarifies this for some people

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Isn't shutting down the onramps effectively a ban on cryptocurrency?

As a actual ban, it wasn't as effective as you'd think in many other countries.

Considering how countries with high inflation such Venezuela and Argentina rely mostly on P2P to on-ramp to crypto I don't think "banning" exchanges will be an effective way to drastically reduce usage in Nigeria.

I'm very new to a lot of this, so you'll have to excuse me if I ask dumb questions.

> rely mostly on P2P to on-ramp to crypto

How does this work? If I have 1000 NGN, how do I convert that to the equivalent in BTC without going through an exchange?

In person

localbitcoins.com

This is interesting! I think for this to really work for Nigerians right now, there needs to already be some critical mass of Nigerian BTC holders bootstrapped. Would be interesting to know if this is already true; from my understanding Nigeria has the among the widest BTC adoption in the world.

This is already true. Actually P2P was the primary way of trading crypto in the country till last 2019-2020. So there is already an established P2P market here

There is another angle to this foreign currency based remittances which support foreign exchange rates were at lowest in 6 years. CBN has stopped most companies that remit directly to Naira based accounts. Their view is that such companies are using cryptocurrencies which do not have ripple effect in their foreign currency markets.

> There are also other nuanced issues in the country about the Central bank needing people to hold the currency (Naira) due to heavy devaluation going on at the moment but lots of people are converting all their money to BTC and this is a way to halt it.

Kinda buried the lede there, no?

Seriously... it’s good for the country to have everyone’s money devalued massively? What is going on?!

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