Changing your mindset about money: Virtual currency war against Africa

“TV is not the truth and you cannot get the truth from people but if you want the truth go to GOD. It’s all about God’s Money (Gold)” - Kokroko Kwasi Kokuro Oppong-Agyare April 18, 2022.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet because there is no America, there is no democracy but there are Apple, Google, IBM, Blackrock, Alibaba, Jumia, MTN, Vodaphone and others.

These are the machines of today’s world’s currency. We are no longer living in the world of ideology because the world is a business and is a college of corporations which run on digital and virtual currencies.

What are virtual and digital currencies?

The European Central Bank defined a virtual currency as "a currency which is unregulated, which is issued and usually controlled by its developers and accepted among the members of a specific virtual community."

The US Department of Treasury states that although a digital currency operates just like a traditional currency, it does not have the same attributes; digital currency is a form of virtual currency that is electronically created and stored, but not all digital currencies are cryptocurrencies.

Any form of currency in a circulation which is not backed by Gold (God’s Money) is worthless.

Based on their purpose and functionality, electronic currencies work in different ways. From a legal standpoint, there are two main types of digital currencies which are centralised (controlled by the central government), which are traditional currencies like the Cedi, Dollar and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and decentralised currencies (controlled by individuals). Interestingly, there is no need for third parties like banks; amazingly no banks, no server shut downs or no blocking payments. All payments can be tracked but can never be stopped.

What is Cryptocurrency-Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is an unregulated currency created in 2008 by someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto. He created a limited supply of 21 million worthless artificial gold which can be mined till the year 2140.

It has no inherent value, so its worth depends entirely on the trust people have in it: in my view, that is the most interesting thing about bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies in the world; the fact that it is a built-in lesson on arbitrary nature of money values.
Bitcoins are created by “mining”, that is by long, slow computer calculations, and are stored and exchanged via digital ‘wallets’. There are no banks, therefore, no bankers, so everyone stores their own Bitcoin in a virtual account called a wallet.

The users control their own money and they can even send micropayments as small as what is called one Satoshi or 0.00000001BTC, (a bitcoin to eight decimal places) or about $0.000005 today.

The value of a bitcoin, like any other currency, is dependent on what the buyer is willing to pay.

This number-crunching burns a lot of energy, and the cost of that energy is the real cost of creating bitcoins. The currency’s main use is in buying and selling things anonymously over the internet, which no central banks around the world can interrupt its usage by using a technology called blockchain. The value of the bitcoin has gone up and down sharply in its short life.

On October 2, 2013, the FBI seized an illegal exchange called the Silk Road, where payment was taken in bitcoin - though it should be stressed that there is nothing illegal about bitcoins per se. In essence the bitcoin is (to quote The Economist) ‘a giant shared transaction ledger recording who owns each individual unit of currency at any one time’, in which all transactions taking place in the currency are simultaneously visible to all its users.

An interesting feature of the currency is how transparent it is: all bitcoin transactions are visible, though also anonymous -the combination of the two things is unusual.

Bitcoin is a new financial system designed by the people, for the people and theoretically everyone has equal power. People control their own money and the rules of the bitcoin system are enforced on everyone by each other through mutual trust. Nobody can tamper with or influence the system except in one unlikely scenario of controlling 51 per cent of the entire network.