Bitcoin blockchain is the last economic bastion, creating jobs for the unbanked

Bitcoin can be used as a way to achieve economic freedom because it is easy to use for merchants and is safe and reliable. Bitcoin can be used not only as a world currency but also as a savings asset. It is the 'last economic bastion'.

Cryptocurrencies are not the same direction as banks, but can blockchain also bring wealth to the unbanked by providing jobs? The West is clearly divided by the blockchains of Bitcoin, Ethereum and many other currencies and tokens.

According to the 2014 Global Findex report, the number of adults with bank accounts worldwide increased by 700 million from 2011 to 2014, while the number of unbanked people decreased by 20%.

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said:

“Access to financial services can be a bridge out of poverty. We set an ambitious target – universal financial access by 2020 – and now we have evidence that we are making significant progress.”

CoinTelegraph spoke to experts about whether they think it’s only a matter of time before blockchain technology impacts developing countries, or if they think the technology has already been developed to impact these countries.

What is currency?

NBitcoin developer Nicolas Dorier explained:

“Money is just a fluid that enables people to collaborate better. But we can imagine applications based on Bitcoin that are like an Amazon Mechanical Turk working in the unbanked world, which currently doesn’t work in the fiat world.”

Lawrence Lundy, a developer at Outlier Ventures Ltd., points out that sites like wework.com and fiverr.com are already doing this by giving people the opportunity to create jobs.

Chris Kitze, CEO of Safe Cash Payment Technologies, commented:

“I think it’s definitely possible, but it would require a rethinking of what money is and how it’s created. If people can do useful labor and use cryptography and public key infrastructure (PKI) to create a unit of exchange, it’s definitely possible.”

Blockchain is a game changer

FamilyOffice.VC chairman and CEO John Gotts said his company wanted to help the unbanked by using blockchain technology, and it appears to be working.

Freya Stevens, marketing specialist at Stratis Blockchain Solutions, revealed that Stratis is creating a full node in C# .NET, making them the first cloud-based blockchain service provider to do so. The company is primarily focused on providing blockchain solutions to the business community in a growing digital economy.

She said:

“Blockchain is a game changer, but the barriers to accessing this technology need to be lowered so more people can participate, discover its utility, and ultimately compete in an evolving marketplace. Bitcoin Core developer Nicolas Dorier is joining our project to make blockchain more widely available to developers and businesses – helping them stay ahead of the curve while creating more jobs.”

Be your own bank

Liana Douillet Guzmán, vice president of marketing and communications at Blockchain.info, said blockchain technology has the potential to provide real meaning and value to the financial lives of the nearly 2.5 billion unbanked and underserved populations — in many ways.

For example, people without bank accounts can take advantage of the cost and technical advantages of blockchain technology to move funds more cheaply and transparently.

She noted that blockchain could also help underserved residents formalize unclear land titles. Here, blockchain could not only reduce the cost of titling land, but also allow those landowners to access the financial system and generate collateral for the first time.

Guzman concluded:

“Ultimately, blockchain technology can help the financially underserved ‘own their own bank’, thereby providing job opportunities for individuals.”

So, on one hand, we have the 'Internet of Things', the infrastructure of our information society, through which blockchain could disrupt the financial services sector. At the same time, on the other hand, we may also see blockchain technology disrupting the way we create jobs.