Zimbabwe Is The World’s Latest Convert To Bitcoin
Bitcoin presents Africa with a once in a lifetime opportunity to smash the shackles of its former colonizers on its polities
Zimbabwe, a country in Southern part of the African continent is the latest nation state to adopt bitcoin as its currency.
Anyone with a remote sense of history will appreciate why this bit of news really matters.
A place which had the reputation of the food basket of Africa, in the aftermath of its independence from Britain in 1980, in the twinkling of an eye, became the basket case of the continent.
Back in 2003, this former British colony was grappling with a major financial and economic crisis, which led to inflation spiraling completely out of control. The nation’s central bank couldn’t print new bank notes to keep up with the devaluation of its currency — the Zimbabwean dollar — leading to a grotesque shortage of bank notes.
For multi national players doing business in Zimbabwe, they simply found a way of circumventing this problem by generating their own currency, which had its company name engraved on the Zimbabwean dollar, which allowed it to make a killing on all fronts.
You may argue with a degree of credibility that Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation in what still remains a politically and economically…