If bitcoin is the great leveller, then why is it still mostly driven by people who are young, white, tech-savvy, and with full access to banking services?
This month, the Bitcoin Foundation has been quietly setting up a committee for Financial Inclusion. The aim, says committee head Andreas Antonopoulos, is to increase awareness and education about bitcoin’s potential role in that area.
Around 2.5bn people in the world don’t use formal or semi-formal banking or financial services, according to the World Bank. But Antonopoulos – a luminary in the bitcoin space, and the chief security officer of Blockchain.info – points out that many of those that are ‘banked’ are not given access to full financial services such as stock markets and trading exchanges, and (relatively) easily transferrable money.
March 20, 2014 at 03:35AM
