Can Bitcoin Deliver on its Promise to the World's Unbanked?
Jason Tyra is a Certified Public Accountant and ACFE Certified Fraud Examiner. In this article, he evaluates the potential benefits bitcoin offers for the world's impoverished and unbanked, and outlines what needs to be done to give this underserved population access to its ground-breaking technology. While many relatively affluent westerners have adopted bitcoin as a political statement, a cost-saving measure or a technical curiosity, a very small portion of its users have done so as a result of the demands of their own political or socioeconomic circumstances. However, for those that....
Related News
Africa remains the home to a large proportion of the world’s population that is unbanked according to a 2017 World Bank Global Index survey. Many of those who are unbanked cite their lack of official identification particulars as one of the main reasons for their predicament. Cryptos Narrowing Financial Exclusion Gap Therefore, in their effort to reduce the number of people that have no access to banking services, Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency and network that is available to anyone. Now, more than ten years later, the crypto asset has had....
In Bitcoin, the promise of a limited supply is great. This was one of the biggest things that initially appealed to me when I heard about Bitcoin. “No more than twenty one million bitcoins will ever exist!” But can this promise be kept in the long run? Has the Promise Already Been Broken? Some would […] The post 21M Bitcoin and the....
1. Who are the unbanked? Unbanked, as defined by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), are adults who don’t have an account at a formal financial institution, such as a bank. They are thus unable to access formal financial services such as credit, deposit accounts and money transfers and have to rely on informal providers of financial services, i.e. mostly friends and family. 2. How many unbanked people are there in the world? According to recent reports, there are over two bln adults - more than a third of the total world population - who don’t have any access to formal....
Stellar Development Foundation is a nonprofit organization working on bringing banking and financial services to the unbanked across the world. A simple Google search is enough to know that there are over 2.5 billion unbanked adults across the world. These people don't have access to, or don't use banks or any microfinance institutions to manage their money. Most of the unbanked population are from the developing countries in African, Asian and South American continents. The unbanked population in these regions do not have access financial institutions or services for multiple reasons.....
Bitcoin could be used as a means for economic liberty, since it is easy to use, secure and reliable for merchants. It is not only used as a world currency, but also as a savings asset. It is the “one last economic fortress”. Cryptocurrencies go where big banks won’t trouble to go, but could the Blockchain also provide wealth for the unbanked by providing jobs in the near future? The western world has by now has been significantly disrupted by the blockchains of Bitcoin, Ethereum and many other currencies and tokens. According to the 2014 Global Findex, 700 million adults worldwide became....