Making money, escaping poverty: Bitcoin and Lightning in Mozambique
A class of 2021 Bitcoiner in Mozambique is using the Lightning Network to transact while using Bitcoin to protect his savings. Bitcoin (BTC) is for all. For you, for Michael Saylor in Miami, and for 38-year-old Jorge, a Mozambican family man who's using the largest cryptocurrency to make ends meet.Jorge, who goes by his first name for anonymity, lives in the tiny village of Bomba, Mozambique, on its southeast coast. Since the Covid-19 pandemic stripped away tourism from the sleepy surf town, one of Jorge’s primary wage earners–tourism–disappeared. Luckily, Bitcoin adoption is slowly....
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The study also surveyed households all over the country to see how mobile money affects them. Mobile money is becoming the new norm in developing African countries. Projects such as M-Pesa have seen tremendous success in Kenya, as it allows more females to create a business career for themselves. More importantly, mobile money has aided nearly 200,000 households to escape poverty, which is an impressive number. All of this spells good news for BitPesa, which offers the same prospects, but uses Bitcoin instead. The new study published in Science magazine this week paints an intriguing....
pLN is a new wallet project that aims to make it easy for users to follow the “happy path” of making bitcoin payments privately on Lightning.
The layer-2 technology built on Bitcoin now has 4,000 Bitcoin or $120 million locked up allowing for near-instant payments around the world. There’s cause for celebration from the world’s largest cryptocurrency. The Lightning Network hit the 4,000 Bitcoin (BTC) public capacity milestone, meaning $120 million in value is ready for peer-to-peer payments.The Lightning Network first broke the 1,000 BTC barrier in August 2020 and the 2,000 BTC barrier in July 2021. The capacity has doubled in the space of 18 months. Lightning Network capacity growth since January 2022. Source:....
Will Bitcoin’s premier layer-two solution finally graduate from experiment to everyday utility, following its adoption by major exchanges? The Lightning Network has grown 75% in size over the past year, hitting a record high 8,900 nodes for the first time on Feb. 8, according to LN monitors at Bitcoin Visuals. A significant proportion of the increase occurred more recently, suggesting that some Bitcoiners are gravitating toward the layer-two solution, potentially as a means of escaping ever-increasing transaction fees.The total BTC locked in LN channels has remained in the 1,000 to 1,100....