Banking On Africa - The Bitcoin Revolution (full documentary) - True Story

how are you feeling very excited making history and also there's going to be a lot of very pleased people at the school it's not just a tech thing it's not just a new invention it's something that can actually help real people so it's fine it's fun to do that and exciting it gives you gives it all meaning not just interest [Music] living at the bottom of africa can really make world affairs feel like things that just happen somewhere else so in 2014 when i heard the word bitcoin for the first time i made it my mission to find out what is so wrong with the way things are that people are trying to change the financial system for everyone the thing about storytelling though the story you expect is never the one you find i reached out to friends to find out who knew about this thing called bitcoin and i was pointed in the direction of lauren within four minutes of receiving my email about being interviewed on bitcoin lauren responded saying yes i do believe that this will impact our lives as much as the internet has done so can you first explain to me what cryptocurrency is all it is essentially is a mechanism for being able to transfer digital assets without there having to be a duplicate of that digital asset i'll give you example if you have an mp3 or a digital photo it's very easy to make a copy of that digital photo or mp3 and send it to multiple friends or what this term is called double spend in 2008 an anonymous developer or engineer or financial guru devised a way to create a digital currency which essentially solved that problem where you could create a digital asset that could be transferred from one end to another and couldn't be easily copied 2011 i read a blog about an underground website that was using this new internet currency that was different from any other currency that had ever come before it i immediately decided to try and play around with it and see where it would go and acquired a number of them where they were worth very little and then over the years i've just seen the usage explode people come around to the idea that this could very well be the next innovation that disrupts and upturns our lives and has a massive positive impact there are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there and they're quite diverse in terms of what their intentions are and what they were designed to do so for me the discussion begins with bitcoin it's the proto-cryptocurrency it's the first one that mattered when you first geek out about bitcoin and blockchain and cryptocurrency you tend to become very excited about the the tech itself and i think i made the mistake quite a few times early on of getting too technical when i'm just speaking to my mum or my wife or friends who just want to understand how it works it's digital money in 2016 we attended the bitcoin and blockchain africa conference so we could hear people who get it explain it there was a woman on stage from botswana who educates people on both the potential and risks of bitcoin after she shared her personal story i snuck over and slipped a piece of paper into hand with the hastily scrolled words i'm making a documentary and i would love to interview you [Music] come come come [Music] welcome to my farm this is a very small uh farm that i started in 2017 when the bitcoin market went a bit up i managed to buy the goats and i bought myself some chickens and i set up the farm and also what might buy myself this car that is why it has got all these bitcoin stickers you can come and check out my goods they're like way cool the other ones are not yet here i think they're still in the bush the humbly beginnings i'm hoping in the future i'll have like much much wider uh farm as i continue in my journey of bitcoin so this is a bitcoin farm but instead of mining bitcoin i'm mining goods the piece of land i got it in 2011. so from 2011 until 27 there was nothing happening i couldn't you know clean it up i couldn't because i didn't have money some of my goats are coming it's one of my passions before besides teaching people about bitcoin my husband is the one who's always like coming here most of the time because as for me i'm always like busy i do my education and doing my satoshi center and sometimes story people have flooded africa with a lot of scams and a lot of other people are falling into those games so i'm going to basically only focus on gujarat where my education is needed i go the whole idea of the farm is so that you know you can be able to sustain myself i'm just educating people without making any profit out of it for me education is very important even though i get stressed when you know my life is is not working according to plan and my vision for this center is not like really accomplished i would say but i'm always grateful for the bitcoin community because they are really a super amazing family everyone in the bitcoin space is amazing the original document that outlined the vision to reinvent the world of finance and technology was released in 2008 against the backdrop of the financial crisis in order to understand all of that the most obvious place to start was money what is money where did it come from and why isn't the way it works working for us anymore you know one of the first things we figured out to do that really distinguished us from the other animals on this planet was invent language and a way of communicating with each other that could convey very complicated ideas we could have armies of hundreds or thousands of individuals where other great apes would only be able to organize in you know clusters of up to about 100 individuals so that gave us an edge language was extremely powerful as an organizing mechanism but the thing we needed next was a way of making our trust in each other portable we used seashells baboon bones were a popular form of currency in africa but money is and always has been a form of an iou note i could give you something and you could trust that that thing had value because society believed it did things like dollars and rents we call those fiat currencies and and fiat is a latin word that means let it be done it basically means that they have value because governments say they do governments tell us that you will use this money you will accept it as repayment of debt and you will pay your taxes in this currency so it really is just because we say so there was a period where fiat currencies were backed by the gold standard and now really money is just backed by a government's ability to enforce taxation within its borders governments or their central banking authorities can print as much money as they want to the decision to print money is something that lies with a few individuals it's open to flawed decision making and really it's it's fair to say that fiat money isn't backed by anything for a time bitcoin felt like a lot of talk and very little action but lauren was taking bitcoin out of academia out of the future and creating a real real-world use for it in 2015 something tangible for the world to see if you consume electricity you're going to have a meter installed at your property there's two modes that that meter can be in either post paid or prepaid post paid is where you just consume the utility and at the end of the month somebody will come and read your meter and then send you a bill and then you pay you're consuming first and then you're paying now prepaid meters are trying to solve the problem where people are consuming and they're not paying which is a problem we have and it's showing itself in our energy provider s com where they say they don't have money to maintain their power stations because they can't recover from the municipalities their municipalities can't recover because nobody wants to pay for the utility they've really consumed it so they're trying to close that gap by switching all their customers up to prepaid so they can't consume unless they've paid but it introduces another problem from the consumer's point of view at least 80 of africans aren't backed if they want to make a payment they have to use cash obviously now the costs are increased because the vendor has costs and there's travelling costs security costs so although prepaid systems will solve the recovery from the utilities point of view it doesn't solve anything from the consumer's point of view bitcoin is a payment system which is an electronic payment system that is outside of the banking system anybody who has an app on a mobile mobile phone it doesn't even have to be a smartphone they can easily become part of the bitcoin economy and have access to your electronic payments so it's just a common sense thing if you think about it that being able to make bitcoin payment method for pre-payment system opens up that massive market and has opportunity to drastically reduce costs and increase efficiency at least from the perspective of the consumer so now there's a solution bitcoin and applied to smart metering can solve for massive problems throughout africa as well as latin america and asia pacific i started uh my journey with bitcoin in a little bit of a segway can you tell me that story my son grenadier on the wall in 2007 i gave birth to a baby boy his name was called paco which means praise he was born with a heart defect called hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy i was looking for ways in which i can raise money and probably take him overseas it was kind of difficult here in botana for for them to promise me anything one time the doctor told me that there's literally nothing that they can do [Music] when we're brought to south africa i was very happy i said my son will get help but they say to me for us to be able to help your son we finish first with a list that is in south africa for children who need transplant so i went online to try and do freelancing so maybe i can be able to raise more funds to help my child and i remember i got across a survey where they say you can do a survey and you can you know be paid in bitcoin i went through that worked you know my heart out i never got any bitcoins from the work that i did a lot of things that i met were scams one stem after another and then in april on the 4th my son died so yeah first time i heard about bitcoin was to raise money for my son so when he died i felt like i've lost the purpose for why i should work online so i just stopped something was just nagging me in my head like you know you need to go back to that bitcoin thing and look at it and see if it can be off anywhere the more i read the more i get learned i decided let me take another step further it's no longer about my son now it's about changing my country it's about changing the people i'll group together people and i'll teach them about bitcoin so 2013 i did my first meet up but before the meetup i did a video which i put on youtube i did an old t-shirt with my bitcoin address and i was like i want to work for this company even by then i don't even understand what bitcoin was like for me it was more like a company then 2014 my my group was growing and i kept on educating people about bitcoin from that moment on what [Music] so why can we trust that crypto is worth something bitcoin as as a primary example has a finite supply which makes it a deflationary currency it actually in very real terms is scarcer than gold there's no central authority that can decide to raise interest rates or to print more money as a part of quantitative easing the bitcoin network runs itself once the network was set in motion that system you know runs by consensus can you tell me about caesar sure imagine a poor school in africa they have a bitcoin meter anybody from anywhere in the world could pay for a week or months worth of electricity directly without having to go to that organization and i actually thought instead of just talking about something why didn't i go and do it what is a zulu word that means help the whole point of this project is to kind of relieve the burden of the electricity i mean obviously there's a lot more things to be paid for in the school and these schools have small budgets if they can have that burden lifted a little where they they don't have to uh actually pay for the utilities then they can then spend what little they have on other things one of the struggles that we've had is trying to get a metering company to agree to the project a lot of these metering companies make a lot of money on the vending solutions they supply taking the fees uh you know from the fiat transactions now having a blockchain based system means that the funds go directly through to the meter and so the metering companies that we've been dealing with weren't willing to go along with the project so it was quite an uphill struggle but like that we have found some enlightenment partners we've got about two bars out of the three so i think communication should be fine but we also have an antenna so what we can do is perhaps bring an antenna through here just to boost the signal so once we get the donation going through and the meter can pick up the payment on the blockchain the next step is for the actual meter to switch on and then we should see the school light up it'll be hard to see now but at least we'll see uh something happen and then on monday night when it's all pitch dark i think it'll be quite spectacular when everything goes on that's the theory very exciting the blockchain is the operating system that it runs on so you can see it as your windows or your linux or mac osx the software layer is the blockchain and bitcoin is an app that runs on top of the blockchain blockchain is the magic behind the money but really it's just a decentralized database stored on a very large network of computers all over the world it is the technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but it's not just for monetary transactions you can use it to store data like patents or wills or to exchange anything of value such as products property services and even votes the authenticity of the exchange of value or transactions is verified by the community as a whole rather than by a single entity removing the risk of a single point of failure in the system each transaction is recorded on a public distributed ledger that can be viewed by anyone in the world the blockchain is a decentralized system and the strength of the blockchain is that everybody is checking everybody else no single institution is in charge of this information now that differs from the current financial system that we actually do have all over the world in the case of south africa and the center of our financial system is the south african reserve bank and the reserve bank checks all the other banks and all the other banks check us and that's the difference between a decentralized system the blockchain for example and a centralized system if i for example want to give you government money or central bank money and i do a transfer from my cell phone to your cell phone it is impossible for me to transfer money from one bank account directly into another bank account we think that is what happens but what really happens is that i send a message to my bank which will send a message to the central bank which will send a message message to your bank to make a deposit into your bank account so there's somebody else always in charge there's always a middleman somewhere between my account and your account so who invented blockchain and bitcoin the creator of bitcoin the cryptocurrency and the technology is satoshi nagamoto people think it's a group of people or it could be an individual is a complete mystery no one knows who he is people have their suspicions i have my suspicions as well several people have come out to claim that they are satoshi nagamoto i think it's quite nice that it's a mystery i like the fact that i don't know who it is and i think we would be disappointed if we found out who it was so why did you name your dark situation bitcoin and cryptocurrency and blockchain technology has taken over my life i love bitcoin i really do and i like what it stands for and the name suits him completely i'll organize small talks and i'll go around i've been in caburoni and i went to francis town to go and teach people about bitcoin i met students who are into i.t we talked blockchain and all that and i began to tell them about the possibility of changing the way things are in our country the way things are in the world i was inspired by satoshi nakamoto not liberating the people from what was happening during the financial crisis coming up with something that would really help people the satoshi center's vision was to create a community lab where people can come and learn about bitcoin and also be able to be very creative somebody came up with this idea of making it possible to trust the record of ownership of money without trusting any individual in the ecosystem that makes things work together and that is such a clever invention that we have to make it work and make it valuable in the way we apply to society if you compare it to the traditional financial system i don't think any of us really get excited about going to our bank we're excited about logging on to a banking system one of the disadvantages of cryptocurrency is the the complexity still that we're working with a very rough technical thing where you need to understand things like the transaction fees and things like that but to be fair if you compare it to the traditional financial system that's not really clear as crystal either it's really very difficult to understand how banking fees are going to apply to you what's it going to cost to transfer 10 000 brands to a u.s bank account things like that are also very very complex what we're going to basically do is an auction the item in question is this over here which is a 100 round nodes we're going to be bidding for this 100 rand note it's a standard auction whoever wins the auction gets the 100 notes slight switch though on the traditional auction model is that the person who comes second has to pay whatever their bid was but they don't get the notes so i'm going to open it up at 10 rand would anybody pay me 10 round four 100 rand notes whose first 10 round we've got 10 rand in the back [Music] 180 round going once 100 radio ram going twice sold for 180 rand you can come and settle afterwards and the person who came second used to settle with me as well it's not that central financial authorities were a bad idea it gave us a way of scaling up to what now it's the global financial system that gave us a way of trading with each other you could travel to the other side of the world and you could start to trade with people there and that was fantastic uh but where it has failed us for example is where human greed has been able to manipulate the system to put it quite bluntly that's the second highest price i've ever gotten for 100 rand nodes it's a great game for me because i essentially now have made 310 rand and parted with 100 rand right the game of course is rigged it's designed so that i'm gonna win and it has to do with the irrational mindset people have around money we all remember what happened with the financial crisis in 2009 in that situation we were reminded again that banks can fail we have a fractional reserve banking system in most countries where banks don't actually have to have all of the money that they're storing on behalf of their customers they only need to keep enough of that money around that they can satisfy all of the withdrawals requested in any given period when a bank gives you a loan to buy a house for example they don't have to have that money either that's basically money they can make out of thin air but when you have a run on the bank when there's a crisis and everybody tries to pull their money out of the banking system at the same time banks don't have that money and that causes them to collapse governments then stand as what we call a lender of last resort so governments say if the bank doesn't have enough money to sort out all of its customers we'll step in and we'll lend them the money to do that but of course that money needs to come from somewhere too and so what happened in 2009 was you had banks which didn't have enough money to pay all of the people trying to withdraw their money the u.s government didn't have enough money to act as a lender of last resort and so the u.s taxpayer effectively had to bail out a bank with a tax-free non-reversible loan that never had to be paid back to the taxpayer now it doesn't really matter how you present that story it doesn't strike me as fair every country's economy is intertwined with every other country's economy imports exports investments and the world reserve currency meant that the financial crisis in america became the global financial crisis the saying before 2008 was that the banks were too big to fail but the bigger they are the harder they fall over a decade later there are now banks that are even bigger than the too big to fail banks of the financial crisis years hi my name is big machado and i have a question for the chief economist so i'm an economic student right and i'm not sure if you've noticed but a lot of people in the bitcoin space they know more about economics than most psg students in universities actually this is because in university we're not particularly exposed to different other schools of economic thought like the austrian school of economics for example and if we're not exposed to certain things then we won't question certain things for example like money in school we're not particularly taught what money truly is what is your opinion of bitcoin being used as a way to escape this economy that's exist that exists right now you're absolutely right that in our universities we should teach other schools of thought as well and a very important school of authority is the school of thought of real freedom and i've got a suspicion this new technology will really put the power in the hands of the individuals and allow us to experience that real real freedom and not to to enslave us the way that politicians have been enslaving us for the last couple of hundreds of years this is a real freedom but not only is it real freedom it's very very dangerous and with that there's a huge responsibility as well 21 year olds don't normally go to events like we did the other day yeah yeah that's not a normal 21 year old thing let's see usually like clouds and stuff right yeah the first time i heard about bitcoin was from a movie called dope this movie didn't cover bitcoin like in a positive like and then i heard it again and i was like maybe let me like look at it and like do some a little bit more research and then that's where i fell down the rabbit hole is the same save my economics teacher was heavily into gold so he was explaining central banking right and fractional reserve banking and insiders think well like this seems a little bit shady he explained that we actually don't need the system in a normal economy things are supposed to get cheaper over time not expensive over time and the common thing that i'm hearing on news or youtube is that no we need inflation so that there's economic growth i did a little bit more digging in and then that's when i found like measles they followed the austrian school of economics right and then they explain that no we actually don't need inflation for economic growth and in fact that like that whole statement is a whole contradiction in itself when you define economic growth it's the increase in production right and the increase in production causes prices to decrease an example of this would be like technology and the first phone came out was like quite expensive and then eventually there was a lot of people contributing to different designs basically providing alternatives to smartphones and then the prices of smartphones decrease over time that also could apply to the economy as whole and now i know that this person what he's saying on tv it's like that's a nonsense and then like what can i do about it it's like buy bitcoin bro using this greedy algorithm i can make a lot of money and actually the only way you could have won that game was to not play it the problem is when you have money on the table human beings start acting in a very curious way but i want to use this auction as an example of our banking system and in fact the financial system that runs the world today because it is rigged there are rules that have been put in place that mean that you will lose every time you play and somebody will make a lot of money because they control the algorithm that ensures that you lose our current banking systems while they're useful for things like buying carrots and going to the movies and stuff are exploitive and they're exclusionary and they cut out a lot of the world and we don't have to play the game anymore because we have the technology now to opt out money was always centralized was always opaque was always exclusionary had too many middlemen too many rent seekers too many people quite frankly benefiting from exploiting others finally we could use the internet to create a financial system that benefited everybody potentially that was resistant to censorship that nobody could take control of that's what the world had been waiting for and finally it arrived with the bitcoin network you know i was never interested in all these subjects you know there's a economics and finance and um since bitcoin like i became interested i would still be living in my oblivious way hoping that whoever's running the system is running it fine and that we don't end up in the same way that zimbabwe ended up where their money became worthless it's not so much about not having a long-term view it's just about being educated on this and the majority of people aren't educated on this can i just go on and say something else that i think is important okay if we use a blockchain system the power is actually where i believe it should be and that's in the hands of the individuals we do not need the permission to transfer money between my account and your account and that of course also opens the possibility for things like for example fraud and tax evasion and all sort of illegal things and that their responsibility is also in the hands of the individuals the way i believe it should be why why should we have that kind of responsibility in all instances when governments got involved with money in all instances without one single exception they have either destroyed the money or they are in the process of destroying it so don't think that the politician or central bank is in a position that you can always trust him it's just another individual just another human and they always make mistakes and it's inevitable but ideologically i also believe that i should have the right to decide for myself whether i want to lend you money whether i want to borrow money it's not up to some politician or some other institution to tell me what i can and what i can't do that's my business there exists a definite two camp divide over where the bitcoin should be used to facilitate liberty and self-sovereignty or if it should be regulated to protect users [Music] can you give me an example of some of these crazy schemes that people are coming up with using crypto there's so many i remember but most of them are coming from south africa so in the very beginning i remember they used to like call me and try to recruit me they said like you have got a network of people who can make a lot of money i'm like i'd rather be poor than to join something that at the end of the day i'll hurt my own people there's always a joining thing it's like a pyramid scheme the lady came to our office she was like really heartbroken because she has put a lot of money into her scheme and then it disappeared you know people actually put their children's school face what i know is once you you start having an influx of people calling and say they want bitcoin not that there's a scheme coming up so they are good in the sense maybe they make bitcoin to be used a lot but at the same time they are really bad the bad surpasses the good one of the biggest challenges to explaining bitcoin is to if somebody who comes already with the free knowledge of what bitcoin is and then they come to you and say like how much do i join how would i make money very quick you try to convince the person that it's not about joining it's like a revolution it's like a new technology arising altogether it's about you understanding they're like no but it's not that the pros for me is liberation freedom the ability to be able to control your money your own money or the ability to send any amount of crypto or carriage imagine if you were to carry a chunk of gold you want to pass through the border or whatever you can't so that's the beauty of of bitcoin the negativity is people using it wrongly you know making our people poor also lack of regulations and stuff if you can have maybe some sort of regulated legal framework it will also help protect us i know you cannot control it because of the way it was created but just regulations you know it can help a little bit since bitcoin's early days it's been shrouded in mystery and controversy from the bankruptcy of mount gox one of the early exchanges to the infamy caused by the dark web silk road marketplace that accepted bitcoin for nefarious goods and services while silk road became one of the first use cases for bitcoin it also perhaps put the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies years behind where it might have been otherwise it was run by dread pirate roberts or ross ulbrick you follow the news you know that ross ulbricht was found guilty by a jury the federal judge took his activities very serious and she actually sentenced him to serve a life sentence they counted at least six individuals who had purchased narcotics off of silk road and died as a result what we basically are focused on one is criminal offenses involving digital currency which could be any sort of crime whether it's narcotics whether it's murder for hire whether it's identity theft and so on in which the bad guys are utilizing bitcoin rather than other forms of money because they in our experience believe it to be untraceable which is clearly an accident on their part um a misunderstanding say the least uh but we also deal with the regulation of exchanges and money okay very nice don't touch every single transaction that occurs in the bitcoin network is recorded in something called the blockchain a public ledger of every transaction that's made the only problem is that even though you can see every single transaction and you can see the addresses which are like the account numbers of the people or that are holding those bitcoins you don't actually know who those addresses belong to so the correct term isn't anonymous it's pseudonymous cash is truly anonymous if you have a suitcase of cash and you go and spend it there's no way that that transaction is recorded so bitcoin is less anonymous than cash and we certainly know how cash can be used for nefarious purposes we know that suitcases of money and drug deals happen all the time there was a name that kept coming up in conversation and research and for his name alone it felt necessary to meet him fluffy pony it's a nickname that stuck years ago that despite his best efforts ricardo is not able to get rid of but amongst the noise of the crypto world fluffy pony definitely stands out why is privacy so important and how is it lacking in the way we currently do things privacy is the natural state of things you're not closing the door at the bathroom because you want to plot to overthrow the government you're closing the door at the bathroom because you don't want people to see you on the loo there's certain aspects of our life we want to keep private that we might reveal to certain people we hopefully take our clothes off in front of the person we're married to but we don't go and walk around the shopping center naked but privacy has become it's sort of become overshadowed by oh bad people want privacy or things like if you have nothing to hide then why do you care about privacy it's not about wanting to hide it from everyone it's just that we want to control who sees the information if law enforcement of the government want information about me they should have to come knock on my door to get that information they shouldn't be able to just get that information because my bank is telling them about every transaction i've ever done [Music] i know people say there is there is information on the internet but it's different if i'm able to like really expand on the information that you picked from the internet and make you understand it makes me feel good because i know i've empowered you you'll take the same knowledge and you you give it to someone so if i'm able to reproduce somebody who does what i do that's the real thing that's the real deal yeah had it not been for him i wouldn't be doing what i'm doing like he made me to know about bitcoin so because i was trying to help him during that time now i'm helping people with knowledge so it's like you know transferring whatever that i wanted to do for him now he's somehow doing it for the people through me i continue to honor him and yeah it will be my baby forever [Music] when i got introduced to bitcoin and it's like okay let me save each month i save i save save i'm thinking more about the future what's going to happen in the future and orientate my actions today that would impact the future i mean that's the reason why i'm studying right i'm like seeing like a really like some interesting stuff in the space of crypto i'm not saying i'm against banking i'm just against fractional reserve banking so i oriented my actions towards that the new financial system i would be a lot more stressed if i didn't have bitcoin honestly why let's say for example if we have the central bank government decides like yo i'm going to print like two trillion rands into the economy the consequences of that would be hyperinflation i can't remember who said this but it says that bitcoin is not about getting your money out of your country it's about getting your country out of your money essentially it's like protecting your savings protecting your store of value that's why i'm into birthday i think the financial crisis started a discussion that bitcoin then accelerated around why the financial system works the way it does and whether or not it should work that way how can we make it more transparent how can we make it more fair how can we improve the world of money for everybody but it was a very difficult discussion to have with people in the early days of bitcoin you know i was writing for finweek magazine at the time and i did a story on bitcoin in 2011. and some of my colleagues literally laughed at me they were like this is the dumbest thing we've ever heard of it's a bubble it'll never be worth more than nine dollars at its height it was worth twenty thousand dollars and it's going to be worth a lot more than that one day and every time we see the cycle we have people laughing it's not going to last it's over inflated and every time they write for a very short period of time and then every time they are proven ultimately wrong in the medium term i believe that one day it's something that you won't have to understand it just makes your life better very few people can tell you exactly how their smartphone works it doesn't matter because the narrative has become about why it's good for them what does it enable in their lives well i can speak to my grandchildren i can stay up to date with the news i can take pictures of my family those are the things that matter you know how the processor works and all of the software that makes it possible nobody really needs to understand the bits and pieces welcome to uh m.o.n in the middle of the night at two o'clock in the morning i followed laurie and artist soweto to witness history being made with a live demonstration of his bitcoin prepaid meter lorien would be skyping through to a conference on the other side of the world at mit in boston where his friend ed would be making a bitcoin payment straight to the meter what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to be ready okay so let's get this whole thing started we're going to be calling right now in about two minutes and then i'm going to come to that classroom shane they've been here for two hours three hours they got your 12. hi nice to see you all thanks for coming can you shortly explain where you are and what you're doing there sure i'm in uh it's a city outside of johannesburg in south africa it's called soweto where i am right now is very close to where nelson mandela used to live in his youth and i'm in a small school we're going to be demonstrating uh our blockchain prepaid metering system so this is now uh one of the electricity boxes i don't know if you can actually see but there is a this is now a just a conventional meter box but there's a blockchain enabled meter over there and uh what we're going to do now is i'm going to go to the classroom and there's uh some features there and uh and it's all dark and it's going to make the transaction so let me just the transaction takes about it should take about 30 seconds all right [Music] okay and we hope it works so now what's happening is it's not going through the blockchain the meter is going to detect the payment it's going to calculate the tariff and then load the required amount of electricity onto the meter there's nothing on at the moment that's why we're done and uh hopefully in a few seconds the meter should be activated i'm not just sitting in one of the classrooms here so you're going to see this stuff yeah you ready all right [Music] this is this is usually what happens you know in a in the live demo oh there we go [Applause] [Music] i've got four sons who are you know busy one of the things that i've been involved with is the cub scouts i take my sons there on a front of friday night and we get involved teaching kids how to you know be independent and also most importantly be good citizens it's very important to get children to consider their communities and their society and do to be empathetic to other people to try and make their communities better to build it up to try and think civic-mindedly [Music] this is the thing that i struggle with so in africa i don't know that it helps to resolve third world problems because i mean if you if you live in a hut you don't have access to the internet you don't have access to a phone do you think that it is actually something that could really genuinely make a practical real world difference here i tend to think that cryptocurrencies have potential to solve real world problems all over the world you're not going to solve all the problems certainly even if it just becomes a global reserve currency the local currency for a country becomes less important where people can trivially shift from whatever the local currency is into bitcoin and then it doesn't matter what happens to the local currency now your reliance isn't on the government to keep the economy stable because you kind of you've got a backup you've got to fall back that's very powerful and i think that that's something that could have lasting effects and impact in africa we've had this leapfrog thing that that occurs where there's an innovation like digital cell phones when they came out those are the first cell phones that really got deployed in south africa and because of that we were on 3g faster than like the united states and most of europe and it's just because the infrastructure is a little bit more modern because it was deployed slightly later in the game there are a class of problems in africa where we can just leapfrog and you know use cryptocurrencies to our advantage and i think that's what's going to happen even though myself on a day-to-day basis i don't use bitcoin in the way i would like you know i do want to be able to spend bitcoin and i do want to be able to have people out there in this country spending bitcoin i want merchants and service providers to accept bitcoin so instead of waiting for them to do that i am now going and actually providing those tools i will certainly you know strive to create the opportunity for people to to spend it in their day-to-day lives and also to accept it in their day-to-day lives [Music] ironically the story i expected was to be told by a bunch of men in suits just in pursuit of more money i expected to find bandits and terrorists and everyday jones organizing dark deeds in dark places but in the last five and a half years the story i thought i would be telling about the crypto space in africa never materialized i've realized that my pessimism at the beginning of this journey was actually just misplaced but regardless that pessimism has now turned to optimism not so much because of the tech but because of the people who are using it to make the circle both bigger and better and that's what i call the beginning of a revolution [Music] uh just off the top of my head bitcoin ethereum classic hunter coin monero ethereum ripple xrp 30 coins bitcoin gold bitcoin silver bitcoin diamond bitcoin private all of the things that start with bitcoin and have another word after it dash z cash there's cordano yes stellar lumens caliber iota another one called the ura [Music] oh sorry that was like a scavenger dash dash uh litecoin cash i've just hit the flank now they're escaping me these coins as many as i can there's uh you know there's so many but it's hard to think of them a little boo-boo um bnb uh privix uh that should be a lot easier

Channel: True Story Documentary Channel

Views: 40,801

Keywords: documentaries, films, true story, full documentary, bitcoin, blockchain, banking in africa, african banks, south africa, block chain technology, bitcoin revolution in africa, trends in africa

Id: _VT_zpHQzBE

Length: 47min 8sec (2828 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Crypt0JAy]

I'd love to make a cryptocurrency foreign currency exchange in Africa .

[u/southofearth]

This doc was just OK, it could have been a lot better if the interviewer wasnt completely clueless.

[u/SwapzoneIO]

Africa is growing continuously in Bitcoin adoption.

[u/sserbianb]

Akon City will be the first to implement a City-wide cryptocurrency.

[u/roveridcoffee]

This documentary is fantastic. Proud to be contributing to the network used by all of these beautiful people.