
Diary of an African Cryptocurrency Miner - rbanffy
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-11-03/diary-of-an-african-cryptocurrency-miner
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sheeshkebab
Crypto currencies definitely are a great alternative to local currencies in
third world countries. I’m from one of those, lived through hyperinflation
that wiped out my parents savings and left them with nothing at the end,
watched the entire industries and countries get decimated bc they wouldn’t
agree on which local currency to trade in, people work and get paid in money
that is worthless next month. Whatever helps people in those places is great!

~~~
joe_the_user
I suppose I'd have two questions about this.

One is what proportion of ordinary people could actually get access to
bitcoins in third world nations.

Another is whether bitcoin mining will wind-up being a way to launder money
and access to energy in the third world - we often hear about oil, diamonds
and minerals being taken during conflicts in third world nations. If someone
could turn oil into wealth with nothing more than an Internet connection and a
portable server-farm, a whole range of abuses might be possible. It's been
claim bitcoin mining in China can be a way to subvert currency controls
already.

~~~
narrator
All you need to get access to bitcoin anywhere in the world is a <$40
smartphone and an account on localbitcoins.com.

~~~
MichaelGG
Sort of. Some places have very limited coverage on LBC. I've gone through my
old ads ($50 BTC!) and in Guatemala it is still sparse. There's a bit of money
pitching it on Facebook groups and grabbing a 5-10%+ markup nickle and diming
it.

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mewfree
Non-AMP link: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-03/diary-
of-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-03/diary-of-an-
african-cryptocurrency-miner)

~~~
shock
This should have been the post link.

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narrator
I was talking with a friend about where all the money for ICOS was coming
from. Well anyone in the world can invest in your startup with no national or
legal restrictions. No accredited investor checking, no IRS backup withholding
for foreign nationals, no international wire transfer fees, no currency
controls, no anti-money laundering procedures, etc. People like this Kenyan
guy who has never had a bank account is who is investing in ICOs.

~~~
isoos
Except that paying into ICO is not investing, more like donating, with very
little legal action if anything goes not as expected (e.g. the ICO "founder"
parting with all of the money).

~~~
quuquuquu
That donation becomes "speculation" if the token received from donating (i.e
paying a price for a token) becomes tradable to other people.

Of course it is a questionable medium to speculating in, since there is no
real mechanism holding the ICO-offerer to any obligation to deliver what they
say they will deliver.

At least with a traditional stock market that is slightly more regulated,
transparent, etc, we can reasonably expect that everyone from Apple to Zapos
will attempt to deliver on what they say they will, with theoretical criminal
charges being the price to pay for those who deliberately defraud investors.

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seunosewa
Don’t the writers think we need to know whether his really small mining
operation is profitable?

~~~
ejanus
Good question..... I wonder why they skipped it. They mentioned electric bills
, and skipped internet data plan.

From the little know I have not seen mining via Wi-Fi. I know of a country
where everybody is using Wi-Fi, is it possible to mine in such a place?

~~~
eru
Mining doesn't need to send much data, so it shouldn't matter at all whether
you use wi-fi or dialup etc.

~~~
ejanus
Please could recommend one (Wi-Fi) rig machine ?

~~~
Dylan16807
Normally you use a computer, so _all of those_ if you add a wifi adapter. If
you have some kind of ethernet-only machine then use an external device (like
another computer, or a router, or a raspberry pi) to turn wifi into ethernet.

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wolco
He would be better off reducing the electric money and buying coins

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Historically, the data shows that this is the right answer.

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paulpauper
as everyone knows, mining bitcoin has slim profit margins, due to hardware,
electricity, increasing difficulty, etc.

So could mining an altcoin offer higher returns? I'm skeptical because if a
coin is too profitable, people will mine the crap out of it and then dump it,
sending the price plunging.

Since June, most alt coins have lagged bitcoin..there are simply too many of
them and no differentiation. With very few exceptions, anything an altcoin
does so does bitcoin.

~~~
dgacmu
This description has it backwards. When an altcoin is profitable, many people
mine it, which sends the difficulty of mining skyrocketing. Remember that for
most coins, the daily production is fixed. So when more people mine, it just
gets harder to mine it. This means that the profit goes down, but the price of
the coin is not necessarily affected.

It's also not really true that Bitcoin does everything that altcoins do. It's
just that most of what altcoins try doesn't seem to matter much in the market,
with obvious exceptions for stronger anonymity (xmr, zec) or smart contracts
(eth).

~~~
icelancer
This depends very much on whether the underlying algorithm is ASIC-resistant
or not. The lessons learned from the BTC mining power laws prove that coins
that allow for ASICs to be developed and come online will see the trajectory
you have outlined. Less so for ASIC-resistant coins like XMR.

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FiveSquared
What about the Internet in Africa? What about unreliable electricity. What
about power outs? How will the miners cope?

~~~
rbanffy
A normal UPS should buy enough time to shut everything down in an orderly
fashion and provide enough charge to run for a while.

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knowThySelfx
Hashgraph is the future, not Blockchain/Bitcoin

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username223
This makes it pretty clear that the 419 scammers are onto the cryptocurrency
thing. I wonder if the smart/big money is still riding this bubble.

~~~
alphydan
Exactly what do 419 scammers have to do with Kenian who has worked hard to
learn programming, was a top developer for Git awards and is learning about
cryptocurrencies?

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
I guess a lot of people aren't at all familiar with Africas geography. I mean
the whole article is called "Diary of an __African __Cryptocurrency Miner ",
presumably because Kenya was too specific and obscure for their target
audience. If your mental map of a continent is largely "here be dragons", I
guess it's easy to associate Nigerian scammers with Kenyan cryptocurrency
miners, who live some 3500km and several international borders away.

It's not limited to Africa though. I'm from New Zealand, and I've had
Europeans ask if I visit Japan a lot, because I'm so close (I'm about as close
to Japan as Germany is). I've had Americans ask if I was ok when they heard
news that tropical cyclones were hitting Queensland (I'm as far from
Queensland as a Jamaican is from Ohio). And the hemisphere thing stumps so
many people. Usually they just constantly forget that the seasons are
reversed, but I've had one educated, multilingual gentleman from east Asia ask
me if North and South mean the same thing in the southern hemisphere, or if
they have opposite meanings.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
To be fair, New Zealand is about 1 AU from everything, so it’s especially
difficult for a lot of us non-kiwis to grasp. :) A relative and I were just
discussing this the other day: he was convinced Australia was further south
than you until I got out my phone, I think because he was confusing New
Zealand with New Guinea. I’ve noticed we do tend to heavily associate you with
Australia in the States, too, so the Queensland question doesn’t surprise me.
Most Americans probably mentally conflate Tasmania and NZ.

To your point, I could probably name most African countries but not place them
exactly from memory, particularly in the interior and on the western coast.
Niger is hot news in the U.S. right now, and we had a week or so of everyone
collectively figuring out not only that it’s distinct from Nigeria but also
proper pronunciation, simply because we don’t think about Africa much (which
is lame, I agree). _Legislators_ were surprised we had troops in Niger, which
should really say a lot.

Geography education is already iffy in a number of places, and I imagine
ubiquitous digital maps are going to exacerbate that problem the same way we
are already losing the ability to memorize phone numbers. John Oliver has been
having fun with this by highlighting the wrong country as a recurring gag on
his show.

