Counting on a GDP registered at $2 billion, Bitcoin is an item more valuable than the whole economic system of this nation. Around 355 thousand people can enjoy Internet services, which currently counts more than 4 million inhabitants.
This week’s most amazing news was that a second nation would accept Bitcoin as legal tender. Right after El Salvador’s steps last year, the Central African Republic approved a new policy that makes the use and acceptance of bitcoin as a payment method mandatory in the entire region.
This event has caused vast and diverse expectations inside the bitcoin environment, where the addition of a new nation that accepts Bitcoin legally got received joy. Bitcoin’s enormous and solid community is among those that acknowledge the benefits that bitcoin has as a store of value.
However, while some citizens and users are pretty happy with this news, others showed concerns about this country’s part in the global economy and the possible impact that its move could have on the Bitcoin space.
The Central African Republic, also named by its acronym as CAR, is a nation that counts on borders with other African areas such as the Congo and Cameroon. Although the site in question was a French colony, in 1960, it became an independent nation that launched its first elections in 1993. So it became a state ruled by a president, ministers, an assembly, and a supreme court.
Despite their politics, which tend to come from republican origins since the 2000s, the African nation went through two civil wars that reclaimed the lives of many citizens. Likewise, this event has had a primordial impact on the economic system, which suffered hard due to conflicts that ended in armed combats, leading it to become one of the poorest and most fragile regions in Africa and the entire world.
Data collected from the World Bank highlighted that its entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) goes parallel with more than 2 billion dollars. This economic highlight represents the monetary value of all items, goods, and services produced in the African nation, of which 58% depend on agricultural activity.
Although the African nation counts on plenty of mineral resources, such as gold, diamonds, uranium, and even oil, 67% of its inhabitants are extremely poor. This information got collected according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
The Central African Republic Counts on a Poor Internet Connection
While almost everyone can go out and purchase a mobile phone in European nations, only 33% of citizens can enjoy this service in the Central African Republic. Considering that the total population of the African country will be 4.7 million people by 2022, only 1.64 million are those who can acquire phones, according to GSMA Intelligence.
Even worse are the Internet connection data, shared by sources such as Kepios and Data Report. These sources expressed that there are approximately 355 thousand users with internet throughout the entire region.
This amount of users is less than 8% of the complete population of the region, which would mean that more than 90% of its citizens would not have the chance of using bitcoin as a method to pay.
By: Jenson Nuñez
