CoinTelegraph. What has changed in the African cryptocurrency space for the last few years?
Verner van Ruyen. As well as around the world, by the number of transactions a day use of Bitcoin gradually grows in Africa. Trading volumes between Bitcoin and local currencies have also grown, and users and government officials began to show much more interest in Bitcoin.
CT. The largest African markets for virtual currencies are South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. How it seems to you, such distribution will remain or we should look narrowly at other countries?
BP. I do not think that soon something will change.
CT. Many experts say that Africa very much will benefit from growth of popularity of Bitcoin. What your opinion in this respect?
BP. I consider too that distribution of Bitcoin will bring considerable benefit to the African countries, but not as quickly as it would be desirable. Of course, access to global finance, cheap micropayments, fast handling of transactions and other benefits of Bitcoin — it is very good, but we still need to solve many problems connected with insufficient knowledge of people, distribution of smartphones, reliability of access to networks and liquidity of the exchanges that users could exchange bitcoins for local currencies and back on a fair rate. On the other hand, early investors in the African telecommunication companies did not think that they are waited by such success, and I hope that we will see something similar.
CT. What relation of banks in Africa to Bitcoin?
BP. Probably, in the world there will be any more no banking group which would not pay attention to Bitcoin. The majority of banks interest the closed blokcheyna, and it reminds me those times when many companies tried to create private paid versions of the Internet. I think, sooner or later banks will understand that the most popular open virtual currency is most profitable also him, and to their clients (just as AOL and Microsoft have understood that nobody is going to use their private networks).
CT. In Africa it is registered not so many bitcoin purses. How the idea of Bitx has arisen? Whether trust problems to Bitcoin and low awareness of prospective clients confused you?
BP. We created BitX not to hit a fast jackpot. In Africa (and Asia, other our active market) there is a huge potential for Bitcoin, and potentially it even allows to jump through several stages of development of financial services. The African and Asian consumers already have such experience: because of lagging of these regions and high cost of land phone lines many of them did not use stationary phones, and have purchased directly mobile.
CT. Many signs are specified that money — like e-mail and the Internet in general — will be digital, and financial services will significantly fall in price and will become available around the world. What your opinion?
BP. The bitcoin completely corresponds to these supervision, and it seems to me that it is the most probable candidate for a role of such global money of the future. But than to argue on it, it is much better to join financial revolution! Everyone can be convinced of convenience and efficiency of Bitcoin, having exchanged the small amount in the fiatnykh money — it is already absolutely simple to make it.
Olusegun Ogundezhi (Olusegun Ogundeji)