With Its Unbanked Majority, Bolivia Can Gain Much From Adopting Bitcoin
A country with a high-rate of the unbanked, a large informal economy and a tumultuous history of inflation sounds like a perfect scenario for Bitcoin and cyrpyocurrencies to thrive. However, a quick glimpse on Bitcoin-related groups on social media shows otherwise. The Bolivian Bitcoin community is yet to take off. Unbanked majority. The majority of the country’s population is unbanked. According to the World Bank’s Global Index 2014, a meagre 11 percent used a debit card to make payments and near 5 percent used credit cards. Although, unlike other Latin American countries, such as....
Related News
Bolivia is one of the rare countries that has essentially banned cryptocurrency, but the nation's blockchain advocates aren't giving up.
BitInka, a bitcoin platform that operates in Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil will soon expand its services throughout Argentina, Colombia and Chile, to become South America's first universal bitcoin platform targeted for the unbanked. Founded in 2013 by Roger Gabriel, BitINKA is one of the only companies in South America which implemented bitcoin trading to create a bitcoin exchange that allows its users to convert/withdraw bitcoin for many local currencies of South America, including the Peruvian Nueva Sol and the Argentinian peso. Through its international and instant bitcoin....
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....
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....
Here's an unfortunate news item. It's being reported that El Banco Central de Bolivia - the Bolivian Central Bank - has banned any form of currency or coin not issued or regulated by the Bolivian government, reports CoinDesk. This, of course, would include bitcoin and similar digital currencies like "Bitcoin, Namecoin, Tonal Bitcoin, IxCoin, Devcoin, Freicoin, 10coin, Liquidcoin, Peercoin, Quark, Primecoin, and Feathercoin." The news was reported originally by the PanAm Post, who points to a resolution dated May 6th "which prohibits the use of coins specifically not issued or regulated by....