The good news is that nearly half of all South Africans (47%) own cryptocurrency in some form or other, while the bad news is that for a quarter of those people, the value of the crypto they hold is somewhere between R10 and R100.

What does this mean? ‘Th research indicates that the bulk of South African crypto investors are experimenting and dabbling without making a significant financial commitment,’ according to KLA’s Tessa Nowosenetz. 

In addition, the study shows that 36% plan to invest in crypto in the future, and that there is huge potential for companies who can tap into this curiosity and deliver on it. 

It’s no surprise that citizens are awake to the potential benefits. After a year in lockdown glued to our devices, and with the stability of the economy seeming to always be on shaky ground, people start looking for alternatives and safe havens. Add to that the fact that millions of South Africans are obsessed with Elon Musk and follow his every utterance on Twitter with a passion that borders on religion.

So when Elon started talking about DogeCoin and Bitcoin late last year and the fact that Tesla began accepting payments in Bitcoin, I imagine that was the moment when thousands of people finally accepted the fact that cryptocurrency is here to stay.   

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers that KLA uncovered: 

• 13% of the respondents are holders of cryptocurrencies that are valued between $70 and $700.
• 3% three percent of the respondents said they own digital currencies whose value is in excess of $3,400.
• 20% of those that are dabbling into cryptocurrency are doing so because they want to diversify their portfolio. 
• 16% of the respondents said they are interested in using or trading cryptocurrencies because “everyone can do it.” 
• 36% plan to invest in crypto in the future. 

These numbers are significant. “This marks the second-highest percentage globally, said Nowosenetz.They are substantially higher than Luno’s estimate of 15% of South Africans being HODLers, and it would be good to take a look at who KLA made contact with in the survey, given the fact that so many South Africans scrape out a meagre existence just above or below the poverty line. For the record, it should be stated that the South African Treasury estimates that there are at least two million retail investors in the country, with R2 billion in transaction volumes recorded each day, according to BusinessTechZA. “Crypto-assets have become too big to ignore and pose a number of risks for consumers if not sufficiently regulated,” it said.

But for many South Africans, there are important and valid reasons why they are going into crypto that go beyond just hoping for incredible, once-in-a-lifetime gaims. Those people are happy to build up their portfolios slowly and see how the industry unfolds.

Nowosenetz provided the following list of reasons why many people are getting deeper into crypto. 

• It allows you to diversify your investments/portfolio (20%)
• It’s easy and accessible – everyone can do it; you just need a smartphone, a bank account, and some money (16%)
• It’s an exciting currency to invest in (8%)
• You can send it to people in other countries (4%)
• It’s not regulated (4%)

And what about for us at Cape Crypto? For us it’s simple – it is the clearest path to Financial Freedom. That is why we have thrown everything at it, and why we support independent movements that lead to Financial Freedom.

If you’re ready to diversify your portfolio and get into Crypto, then look no further than Cape Crypto, the fastest and easiest way to use your phone to start trading cryptocurrency. Download the app today. 

Understanding the core value of Bitcoin requires us to take a step back and examine two concepts of society: Leadership and Authority.

What is the difference between authority and leadership and what is their correlation? 

Authority is the state of having charge over a community, with the power, the means and the might to enact decisions over this community regardless of the choices, opinions, beliefs, feelings, or thoughts of the community.

Leadership, on the other hand, is explicitly representative of the community. Leadership exists because the people in the community have raised a hero from it, that represents them. A leader is a person who influences and inspires through truth, integrity, and transparency. A true leader serves the people, and finds meaning through service. 

So what happens when you have people in authority who are not leaders but are instead simply after power? You have a dictatorship. This more and more is what we have collectively witnessed worsen over the past year as government representatives have clamoured for power at the expense of our freedoms. We have seen our jobs ripped away from us by enforced lockdowns. We have seen our livelihoods destroyed by lockdowns accompanied by the trite phrase “lives over livelihoods” as if the two are somehow magically separated. We have seen people lose all their income and deplenish their hard earned savings. People have become destitute. People are dying from suicide, hunger, and crime, because the government lockdowns have wrecked the free market economy. Government lockdowns were certainly not the will of the people who have lost their jobs.

Authority without leadership is a dictatorship.This is the core of the problem, and this is where Bitcoin comes in.

Bitcoin is the anti-dictator defence device of critical thinking, forward-looking people. It looks to the Future and sees the trajectory of the loss of freedoms that have been gradually surrounding all of us as we have been gradually coerced into surrendering more and more of our privacy, more and more of our freedoms and control over our time and money.

Bitcoin is an attempt to reclaim some of those lost freedoms. It is a means of managing our own time and money. 

Money equals time. In essence, if you don’t have money you need to sacrifice your time in life in order to work to get money to survive. If you have money you don’t need to work and you can instead spend that money on activities in life that you enjoy and that fulfil you. 

Now up until this point in history money has been tightly controlled by the bankers, lenders, and the governments. it’s been tightly controlled, tightly regulated, and the circulating amount of money has been inflated or deflated at will. What bitcoin aims to do is give you back your time and freedom because Bitcoin is a means of escaping the hyper-inflation that the governments have been levying on us and burdening us with for decades. 

Most people haven’t had the time to fully grasp what inflation actually is – inflation is the act of printing money, unbacked by any security, and adding it into the existing money pot. Now some traditional financial people might try and tell you there’s much more to monetary policy than that and to a small degree there is, but the fundamental, the 99% of it is that if you print more money, the value of the existing money in circulation decreases.

Here is some simple logic: You had R20 spending power to buy a bag of apples. The government decides to print more money. Shops put up their prices to cover this inflation, and all of a sudden the price of apples is now R22. But you haven’t been given any of this newly printed money have you? You still have R20, but now your spending power of your hard won R20, is worth less than it was. It’s less than the bag of apples. Thanks to the decision to print more money, you can no longer afford the bag of apples.

Let’s look at it another way, whenever the government decides to print money, it is essentially comparable to them removing money directly out of your bank account. Because the spending power of the money in your bank account is now worth less – you are able to buy less things. This means you get poorer and poorer everytime money is printed.

This is the bane of inflation. Of course in a capitalist world a bit of inflation can be good, it can stimulate buying – we don’t want to live in a world with the opposite of inflation – ie deflation where it stimulates saving your money instead of spending (because it is worth more tomorrow than today, so better to hold off buying those apples because they will be R18 tomorrow) because that sends the markets grinding to a halt as people are reluctant to part with their money today because money is worth more tomorrow than it is today. 

So while inflation itself is not a terrible idea, the problem is that decisions taken by government decision makers have the power to dilute the market whenever they see fit. Now through all the global lockdowns throughout the world as so many loans and stimulus packages are being invented and more money is printed to pay for them, what they are doing, and you need to recognise this, what they are doing is they are systematically lowering everybody’s net worth. 

Unless you hold Bitcoin your net worth has been lowered every time money, or a new stimulus package is printed. 

OK so what’s the answer to all of this? 

Is it simply to sell everything and put everything into Bitcoin? No of course nothing in life is that extreme, but what is looking more and more likely is that there will come into being a parallel system through which we will have both centralised and decentralised money, because to the governments that we nominate, elect, and fund to to maintain the roads, sewage, and other public works like parks and recreation we will continue to pay tax towards – and these entities need to be centralised and they need to be controlled and centralised from centralised powers of public accountability. This is ok, this is good, this is reasonable – we as a community put somebody in charge of things that we as the whole community have decided that we want, we all want sanitation, we all want roads so we are content to pay some taxes towards that, but this vast, draconian scope that the global government’s have amassed,  this whole power grab of controlling money and freedoms this needs to end and this is why Bitcoin was created – it was created to defend against inflation and protect individual fiscal freedom. 

Do you remember the 2008 collapse – the ‘global financial crisis’ that’s what it was called. Global financial crisis. That was 12 years ago, this was the genesis of Bitcoin because governments decided to print money to bail out failing companies and they up-ended our free market. This goes far beyond their mandate as public servants.

Bitcoin is the defender against that, it is the public defender against hyper-inflation. This is why it’s imperative that you own it and this is why the price keeps going up, because of the printing of more and more money. Can you see the same thing is happening now? What happened in 2008 is a stark warning to what is happening today. 

So buy Bitcoin and hold it, but of course we all still need to work and play in society. Cape Crypto is a centralised entity because we recognise the value in banks and centralisation, we don’t dislike fiat money we don’t dislike local currency, but we do dislike government decision makers with too much power having the whimful power to print money whenever they see fit, to the detriment of us, the people, without the people’s consent. We dislike dictatorial governments, but we love leaders. 

This is the fundamental problem that Bitcoin is solving. This is why Bitcoin.