The Silent Revolution: Bitcoin and International Remittances

Editor's note: John Biggs is a New York-based writer. After working as a programmer for several years, Biggs decided to become a full-time journalist. His work has been published in the New York Times, Gizmodo, and Men's Health magazine. Biggs is currently an editor at TechCrunch and is also the CEO of Bitcoin startup Freemit.

My family used to live in the town of Lepin, Poland.

We visited there every few years in the 1980s and 1990s, and the entire journey from the United States to Warsaw Chopin Airport was spent on a Boeing 747 aircraft. The only thing that accompanied us during the trip was a shaking overhead projector playing movies. The staff on the plane were very friendly.

After we came out of the airport, we took an FSO Polonez car. The driver who drove us was a bearded man. He asked us to pay $60 for the 155-kilometer journey. In the 1980s, this type of car was very popular. It had ample space and was suitable for carrying more than two people.

When we finally arrived at Leiping Town, we found that it seemed to have been abandoned for a long time. At night, soft coal smoke floated in the streets, people stayed at home, and stray dogs in the distance kept barking, but there were still a few people visible in the town.

Then we saw rows of empty houses.

Poland suffered a severe brain drain in the post-Soviet 1990s, and lost even more when the European Union opened its borders in 2004. As a result, small places like Lepin were hollowed out, with people leaving their homes one by one and leaving the area uninhabited.

The rows of houses were incomplete, with plastic debris whipping the empty windows like waves, and the wooden doors were in tatters.

For many of those who left, they had planned to send money back home to complete the construction of their homes, but in the end, they all chose to give up.

Movement of money

This was the first time I saw the power of immigration.

This was the first time I understood what happens when people from a poor country are accepted by a richer country, changes and improvements, but also failures. Some of my relatives left here a long time ago, before the land dried up, but I could understand the consequences of their actions. They took me to a place where there were no empty houses and no people had migrated.

This exodus happens in almost every country for a variety of reasons. Poland's brain drain will, in the end, be beneficial for those immigrants who promote the knowledge and entrepreneurial revolution.

However, the refugees fleeing Syria are the most miserable. This migration is forced and the consequences are terrible.

After such large-scale migrations, problems arose one after another, and the main source of these problems was the movement of money.

Why was construction halted in Leiping? Because the people who left were unable to send money home to complete the repairs. Why did the refugees abandon everything and leave their homes? Because they had no sound way to transfer wealth from war-torn areas to safer places.

In short, there is a gap between the reality of sending money and the reality of money transfer. It is as if we have connected the entire modern economic system to a noisy steam engine and expected it to perform like a V8 engine.

Here's my prediction for 2016: The world will be unrecognizable to us. I'm not naive enough to say that Bitcoin will help solve the refugee crisis, but I'm optimistic that it will help the unbanked and underbanked. I see a way for refugees to send money home. I see a way for foreign workers to continue to put fuel on the stove, to bring their grandmother the food and medicine she needs, while her children and grandchildren change the world.

If you go back to Repping today, it's no longer empty and you'll find a thriving small community that has moved from the depression of my youth to a city on the brink of prosperity.

A Quiet Revolution

Time and again I see technological advances helping a small number of people.

3D printing and STEM education are technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the world, but they often fall short. Why? Because they require investment, which requires a reliable, accessible system for transferring money.

For any feel-good technology story we airdrop into remote areas, we find that these technologies won’t exist in some places. But just as the internet dismantled informational inconsistencies, technologies like Bitcoin will dismantle economic inconsistencies.

There is no reason not to learn the world's most intelligent way of storing value, and there is no excuse not to acquire the world's latest way of storing economic value.

Sadly, this coming revolution will be a quiet one.

Like all great technologies, Bitcoin will soon be hidden behind countless services and tools. It will become an anonymous conduit that only a few people can understand, but everyone will use. This is also one of the reasons why Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, will remain anonymous: he or they, or she, cannot be the figurehead of this new technology, just like Mr. Tim Berners Lee cannot be the main promoter of the network.

The web of money is coming, and it will soon permeate our world as much as the internet did.

Finally, a network of money can send money to where it is needed. It is the great leveler that can make a remote place full of coal smoke and stray dogs become vibrant again.

It’s a way to empower the poor to have a better life, to get them across borders, when they’re ready to colonize the places they once left. In the end, the currency becomes a message of home, a break from the chaos that was before. This is what I hope for 2016, and beyond.

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-for-grandma/
By John Biggs
Compiled by: Satuoxi
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/bitcoins-for-grandma)