How I Lost Money Trying To Spread Crypto Education To The Global South

Lessons from a hack and reasons to continue

The concept is simple: we are at the dawn of a new way to view power and the earliest adopters will benefit the most. This is an opportunity to re-balance the world, so it’d be a shame if the same places and people that hold the power in the current order benefit most from the coming one. Adoption of crypto currency is higher in the global north than the global south and that is the problem I seek to address: How best to grow crypto in the global south?

My interest in crypto has always been focused on its potential to change entrenched power dynamics and has never been about monetary wealth. In the early years I tried to get as many people as possible interested. I talked about it, wrote about it and sold it. I’ve divided my adult life between the global north and global south but my efforts were almost exclusively in the former. It was a shorter bridge to cross. People there were already using the internet in complex ways and e-commerce was well established. This was eight years ago, which is eons in crypto time, and I also wasn’t entirely sure that Bitcoin would survive so having disposable income that you could lose was a pre-requisite.

Now, I’m certain of its survival and it’s been amazing to see it’s adoption over the years. The problem is that adoption has been very uneven. This year I’ve split my time between the United States and Ecuador. It is mainstream now in the US, while hardly anyone has even heard of it in Ecuador. That’s problematic.

How best to grow crypto in the global south?

My first attempt at answering this was to fund crypto-education classes. I would pay a teacher/ organizer more than 2x a local day’s salary and gift every student one day’s local wage to participate in a short intro class which would include actually using the crypto I would provide.

Trust would be an obvious issue, but it seemed worth pursuing.

The first teacher I found, via Twitter, was in Colombia on the Venezuelan border. We chatted by phone and it seemed we were on the same page. I said hello via video chat to the first class to verify there actually was a class and then sent the teacher, David, the crypto to distribute. Afterwards we discussed how it went and ways we could improve. The next week he was able to round up more neighbors and have a new class. The first time we used Monero, this time we used Bitcoin Cash.

After the class I did a simple blockchain analysis and followed the crypto from my wallet to David’s. He did send out some smaller transactions during the class but kept most of it for himself. A few hours later he sent the remaining amount to an exchange wallet. He was skimming from his students.

I knew there would be people like David but hoped I could get a few honest teachers on the payroll before that. There are ways to mitigate this — telling the students via video link exactly how much they will be receiving at the start of the class perhaps — but none are scalable. Even then, David was simple and opportunistic, a savvier bad actor would be difficult if not impossible to catch.

I have been teaching a friend in Ecuador, someone I’ve known for 15 years. Trust won’t be an issue with her, and she will continue to teach classes after I’m gone. That’s nice but also not scalable.

Crypto is trustless and cuts out third parties, so it’s a conundrum. In a way, I’d like to become a third party in order to free people of third parties, but perhaps there is a better way to solve this problem.

What is a better strategy? If you had time, money and expertise to donate, how could you best use that to grow crypto in the global south?