Latest news with #developingworld
Forbes
4 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
False Choice Between Bitcoin's Store Of Value And Medium Of Exchange
Bitcoin's Store of Value A debate has raged in Bitcoin between its two primary use cases, store of value and medium of exchange. This debate has waged on since its inception, though the contours of the debate have waxed and waned over time. In fact, Satoshi was likely aware of Bitcoin's bottlenecks to scaling, given that the original implementation of off-chain payments using the frequency field of transaction outputs was part of Bitcoin's original design. Payment channels in the Lightning Network eventually became a better way to achieve off-chain payments, and by 2015, the Lightning white paper planted the flag for Bitcoin as a vehicle for payments. In the last four years, however, the narrative has shifted towards Bitcoin as a store of value. At the same time, Bitcoin also had its roots as a form of digital gold, evident from the early connection between Bitcoin and Bitgold. The early conversation on the Bitcoin talk forum certainly makes reference to a digital version of gold, and the miners do the hard work of extending the chain and bringing new Bitcoin into circulation. I saw the debate in sharpest contrast in February at the Presidio Bitcoin launch event, where Jack Dorsey and Michael Saylor gave alternate opinions on this. Dorsey talked persuasively about Bitcoin's utility in the developing world, where reliance on third-party payment providers like Visa and Mastercard imposes real economic costs and infringes on freedom. Bitcoin's high value over time will come from its utility, which is a medium of exchange. Bitcoin still has a long way to go for broad use as payment, and the Bitcoin community can't give up on making real the original vision of the white paper. Saylor offered an equally convincing defense of Bitcoin as a store of value. The vast majority of capital in the world is not used for payments but for storing and preserving value. For Bitcoin to succeed, it must gain market share against the major asset classes (equities, bonds, and real estate). Saylor takes a broader definition of peer in the white paper. A peer need not be an individual, but could be an institution, a bank, a corporation, or a city. Not every person in the world needs to run nodes, but maybe the big institutions do. Just like gold, bitcoin can become the reserve asset of the world and a settlement layer between financial institutions. They both are. I believe Saylor and Dorsey are each advocates for the world as they see it. Saylor and Dorsey are both articulating a vision where they believe the marginal resources and time should be spent. And their views reflect their own backgrounds, with Dorsey emerging from the payment space and Saylor operating in the fiat capital markets. In the short term, there may be a trade-off between these two use cases of Bitcoin, as companies and individuals need to decide how to allocate their own time and resources. But in the long term, there is room for both. The real competition is not between Saylor and Dorsey, but between Saylor plus Dorsey and the rest of the tech industry. That industry is many, many times larger than our little Bitcoin bubble. Maybe I am copping out by saying we don't have to pick between Bitcoin as a store of value and medium of exchange. But really, I'm saying that all use cases of Bitcoin reinforce each other. When the world turns to bitcoin as the best investment, it will naturally want to transact in bitcoin. Similarly, if bitcoin wins the race for the best global payments, that will marginally induce more people to acquire and hold bitcoin. The real opportunity on the technology side is to more deeply integrate Bitcoin with AI. AI agents need deep ways to interact and engage with Bitcoin. We already have AI agents that can pay each other through Lightning invoices. But we need neural networks to trade and negotiate with each other using the kind of higher-dimensional transactions that Taproot was designed for. As for stores of value, AI can help design new custody solutions and more complex, useful tools as the next generation of banks holds bitcoin as their reserve asset. So, I am optimistic. And who knows, once Bitcoin achieves a store of value and medium of exchange, all that's left is the last item on the list, the unit of account.
Zawya
21-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Africa's Leapfrogging from Oil and Gas is not the Quick Energy Fix the World Seems to Think it Will be (By NJ Ayuk)
By NJ Ayuk, Executive Chairman, African Energy Chamber ( As the hottest year ever recorded draws to a close, climate change is passing from theory to reality and gaining ever-increasing urgency in statehouses around the world. The goal of achieving net zero CO 2 emissions worldwide by 2050 is widely agreed upon by climate experts as necessary to avoid irreversible changes in Earth's weather patterns that could cause centuries of harm for everyone. The big question, of course, is how do we get there? Who bears what burdens, and how? For the developed world, the answer is strikingly simple: cut, cut, and cut some more. The countries that generate and consume the most energy have brought us to this point, and it's their responsibility to become more efficient and find new and cleaner ways to maintain their current, comfortable lifestyle. While the cutting part has left much to be desired so far, the new and cleaner part looks promising. The cost of renewable energy (RE) sources such as wind and solar have been drastically reduced over the last decade to become some of the cheapest options available. This is where the question gets thorny: What about the developing world, which has barely even begun to emit carbon, yet desperately wants (and deserves) to catch up to the developed world's standard of living? How do places like Africa get what they want without erasing progress toward net zero? For many, the answer is leapfrogging. What is Leapfrogging? In short, leapfrogging is the idea that developing nations can bypass the last century and a half of carbon-heavy energy technology and jump straight to 100% renewable energy with no middle stage. It's easy to see why this idea is tempting, and why so much talk of it is focused on Africa. Cheap technology is appealing to poor countries, and our equatorial continent between two oceans has some of the greatest potential for solar and wind power to be found anywhere on the planet. Currently, more than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to electricity, and the total population is expected to double in the next three decades, so the demand is already enormous and accelerating by the day. By 2050, one in four people on Earth will be African. Western attendees at climate conferences such as the United Nations Conference of Parties have opined that the world 'cannot afford' for developing countries to follow the same trajectory as Europe, the U.S., and China to reach abundant, reliable energy supply. Mohamed Adow, director of the energy and climate think-tank Power Shift Africa, states that 'Africa stands on the cusp of sweeping economic development. Whether this development is powered by clean renewables, or dirty fossil fuels, will go a long way to determining if the world meets the Paris Agreement goal…' Greenpeace urges African leaders 'to avoid falling into the fossil fuel trap and lead the continent towards a clean, renewable, affordable and sustainable energy future.' Boiled down, the implication is that Africa should avoid ANY investment in fossil fuels —complete prohibition. Suggesting otherwise in some circles verges on taboo. But is it realistic to expect Africa to go all-in on the latest technology and forego other resources it has in great abundance, like natural gas? Do the numbers back up their assertions? And is it even fair to ask so much from people with so far to go? Not as Cheap as It Sounds Even as solar panels and windmills drop in price, obtaining them is only one part of a much larger equation. Solar arrays, for instance, can be installed on a single home or in a microgrid connected to a small group of residences to power them directly. Multiply this by hundreds or thousands and the arrangement is known as distributed solar energy. Leapfrogging using distributed solar has been described as similar to how the developing world leapt right past landlines and straight to cell phones with seeming ease just in the last couple of decades. If we can do it with communications, then why not energy? Cost, for starters. A basic 8W solar array can cost 10 times more than a cell phone in a single year in Kenya. An 8W system is just enough to power a couple of LED lights and a cell phone charger. If you want to power a TV, a refrigerator, a washing machine, or other energy-intensive appliances, you'll need a bigger and more costly array. If your village's microgrid is small, what happens when too many people get refrigerators and air conditioning? Time to increase the size of the grid. And then inevitably, what happens when the sun doesn't shine? Add storage batteries, or a local power storage facility. Expand from powering homes to industrial and agricultural use? Now your costs are growing exponentially. Realistically, who would stay satisfied for long with just two lights and a phone charger? The difference between distributed cellular and distributed solar is networks. Distributed cellular works because everyone's cell phone connects to a huge, centralized network of cell towers that are connected to reliable power and do all the work of connecting calls on the back end. Imagine if every home had to have its own cell tower and all the necessary hardware and software to connect to all the other phones in the world, and you can see how quickly that would get very expensive. That is distributed solar's disadvantage — every separate grid has to do it all, and if one fails, the others can't pick up the slack. The end result is a patchy, uneven, and unreliable supply of energy that is easily sabotaged by spikes in demand or ebbs in supply. Like cellular, energy works best with economies of scale. Large central networks allow energy demand to be distributed based on supply and demand, with one region's excess balancing out another's shortage such that only the largest events can impact the entire grid at once. Can solar and wind grids be built this way? Yes, but to support industrial and agricultural use, it requires a huge investment in land as well as money for a payoff that is currently underwhelming at best. The Benban Solar Farm in Egypt covers more than 37 square kilometers (14.3 square miles) — large enough to be visible from space — but can still only power 420,000 Egyptian homes; a small fraction of the country's 102 million people. Expanding further might be fine in a country that's mostly empty desert, but how much land can be set aside in more humid, arable climates where every scrap of farmland is needed to survive? Mixed Energy Won't Be the End of the World While renewable energy does look like a great way to get people up and running who are starting with nothing, it clearly isn't ready to solve all the problems of nations seeking higher levels of prosperity without all the guilt. African countries need to tap the power of the grid and every resource available to them in order to achieve what the West takes for granted every day. That includes fossil fuels, which Africa possesses in abundance, like it or not. But wouldn't industrializing Africa with fossil fuels lead to climate catastrophe? The answer to that question is often greatly exaggerated. Adding 250 million homes to the grid with 35 kWh/month usage (enough for a TV, refrigerator, and fan), even entirely from coal, would only increase current global greenhouse gas emissions by 0.25%. Of course, no one is suggesting firing up hundreds of coal plants across the continent, but natural gas is widely acknowledged as the cleanest form of fossil fuel, its use for generating electricity is well established, and Africa already has massive amounts of it. Instead of starting at the bottom of the carbon ladder, burning the dirtiest stuff first in its own industrial revolution, Africa is poised to start at the top. The no-carbon approach may not be fully feasible, but a low-carbon approach most certainly is. A Question of Fairness According to a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), staying within a 1.5°C maximum average global temperature rise will require a 45% decline in global CO 2 emissions from 2010 levels by 2030. In reality, it needs to decline more than twice that fast since global emissions actually grew 10% between 2010 and 2019. In 2021, Africa accounted for just 3.9% of all CO 2 emissions worldwide. All of sub-Saharan Africa could triple its electricity use overnight using only natural gas and still account for only a 1% increase in global emissions, so low is its starting point. By combining natural gas with renewable energy to make the best use of both, the increase would certainly be less than that. It is hardly fair for the rest of the world to tell Africa to hold itself back for the 'common good' while they continue to belch out 96% of the problem. The solution to climate change is not for the developing world to risk 'leapfrogging' over vital steps to industrialization, but for the developed world to do far more to reduce its own output that created the mess in the first place. Africa deserves the chance to improve the quality of life for its people, and it has the resources to solve its own problems if given the chance. Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Energy Chamber.
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Speed And Safety: What Circle's IPO Means For Stablecoins
Evolution of payments to stablecoin From minted coins and paper notes to credit cards and electronic transfers, money's development has been a march towards greater convenience, efficiency and safety. Stablecoin issuers now view themselves as the latest stage in this journey. With stringent Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), credit history, and solvency requirements, the modern financial system excludes many individuals and small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) in the developing world from participating in the global, dollar-based economy. According to Mento Labs, a decentralized stablecoin platform, 'nearly 2.5 billion people (a credit gap of $4.9tn)...are excluded from formal financial services.' From Mexican farmers lacking credit histories to cash-strapped Indonesian SMEs, developing consumers' demand for capital has been walled in by regulatory and technical barriers. Despite stablecoin's origin as a liquidity tool for specialized crypto traders, the technology is now billed as an inclusive upgrade to a traditionally Western-dominated financial system. This focus on efficiency and ease-of-access is reflected in many current issuers' value propositions. The current stablecoin market Early stablecoins, like BitUSD, NuBits, and TerraUSD, used algorithms and crypto collateral to prop their peg to the dollar. These pillars collapsed in market downturns, prompting most issuers to shut down, their tokens worth only a small fraction of real dollars. Tether distinguished itself by backing its USDT stablecoin with fiat securities, such as cash and Treasuries, opening the door for the tokens to act like digital dollars instead of a risk asset. Particularly in international transfers, this newfound predictability has fueled significant cost reductions; wire transfers costs of sending USD have long hovered around $44 per transaction. With the advent of USDC (Circle Internet Financial's stablecoin), on Ethereum, that cost dropped to $12. More recently, on faster and cheaper Layer 2 blockchains like Base, this cost has fallen to below one cent. International transfer costs have dropped by over 97% since 2015. Seizing on this opportunity, investors poured capital into the industry: In 2021, the market cap of the top three stablecoins was $54.66 billion. As of 2025, those top three became ten, and total market cap had quadrupled to $221 billion. Notably, traditional finance heavyweights like Paypal and Blackrock entered the industry, signaling broader institutional adoption. Comparison of top 10 stablecoins In this still-growing stage of the industry, issuers are adopting a variety of strategies to attract users and uphold the peg. The aforementioned traditionalists adopt Tether's strategy, using US dollar deposits and Treasuries to maintain the 1:1 equivalency. On the other hand, decentralized finance (DeFi) companies like Ethena or Dai favor complex crypto derivative and smart contracts to complement leaner fiat reserves. Across the board, companies grapple with the need to balance efficiency with regulatory compliance and predictability. A Balanced Offering Despite this difficulty, future market leaders will need to walk this tightrope. The ideal issuer must balance three pillars: a reliably fixed value coin, network connections that maximize potential user base, and an embrace of auditing/regulation. One company that has adopted these three pillars is Circle, whose USDC stablecoin is the second largest by market cap. Their reserves are audited by Deloitte and stored as repos, short-dated Treasuries, and cash. Similarly, Circle's euro-backed stablecoin, EURC, is supported by euro-denominated reserves held as cash in segregated, global bank accounts. Circle's public reserves are split evenly between Repos and Treasuries. Even after breaking their USD peg amid Silicon Valley Bank's (SVB) infamous 2023 collapse, Circle has regained the market's confidence by diversifying away from regional banks like SVB assuring investors that reserve deposits would be fully available to them after the collapse. The company has won further trust by embracing increased stablecoin regulation. Since launching USDC in 2018, Circle voluntarily published monthly reserve reports. Their rival Tether, the largest stablecoin by market cap, has never been fully audited. CEO Jeremy Allaire has led the charge, praising recent legislation like the GENIUS act and calling for all USD-pegged stablecoin issuers to be registered in the US. Circle compounds on their transparency and stability mantra by combining USDC and EURC with a collection of Web3 services designed to increase user flexibility. While minting/redeeming services, smart contract, and developer tools are not unheard of in the industry, the company's combination augments the company's already robust stablecoins with a convenient, all-in-one package. With their focus on accessibility and transparency, Circle's leadership is confident the upcoming IPO is more than a chance to raise capital. Opening Circle to public investment brings the company one step closer to an ecosystem where the "speed, cost, and access" of blockchain commerce unlocks global prosperity. Special thanks to Jonah Kim for his exceptional thought leadership, research, and editorial contributions to this article as well providing images and info-graphics.
Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Bill Gates: Elon Musk's cuts will kill a million children
The planet's formerly wealthiest person is not happy with the current one. Bill Gates said: 'The image of the world's richest man taking steps that over time will kill over a million children? It is a pretty stark one.' Elon Musk, who has overseen massive cuts to the US overseas aid budget, 'has not been out to see kids dying', Gates added. In his work with his foundation, Gates is, conversely, rather familiar with children dying. Thanks in part to Musk, he thinks there will soon be more of them. Each year, with all the diligence of a business, the Gates Foundation runs the numbers for its key performance indicators. Five million children die every year in the developing world before their fifth birthday.
