As a person who has been trading and following up with Cryptocurrency since 2012, I have seen and witnessed a lot things regarding cryptocurrencies and crypto-exchanges, am here to share a tiny bit of what I have experienced and the impact it has had to me and my Country – Tanzania.
I have been freelancing online since 2011, one of the major obstacles that I first faced is, on how am I going to be paid, I can work online yes, but how can I get the payment to reach me here in Tanzania? At first I opted to try and use Western Union, it was ok but the problems using Western Union is that, back then they had a minimum transfer amount, which was above $20 - $25 I do not really remember the exact amount, but was around that. Secondly another problem was that the fees where extremely high, to transfer $50 you had to pay a fee of up to $10, that is around 20%.
At that time, I had just starting freelancing and I was taking on any job I could get, so I was earning as low as $1 per job, for us in Tanzania $1 was around 1500 – 2000 TZS.
A normal Tanzanian could live of 3000 – 5000 TZS per day, so to me $1 was valuable and I accepted those jobs, first to gain experience and to be known by people, as freelancing is a competition. Some jobs I took I even had done them for free, anyway my point being is that I was doing jobs that had low paying value and I had no possible way to receive such a low amount.
This needed to change, so what I did is befriend people and ask them to receive the money for me, and then when I reach a reasonable amount, they can then transfer it to me to Tanzania with Wester Union.
I had no choice but to do this, in order to accept those small paying tasks and also to overcome the high fees of transferring money, I had to accumulate payments until they reached $50 - $100, and then asked my friends to send me money. Now this was challenging, because they were my “friends” but I had never meet them in real life, only through online.
It was a risk but I had to take it and try something new, and trusting them to hold my money. In hopes that they will send it to me, when the time comes, also another challenging thing is that, they had to be free in order to go find a Western Union shop and send the money to me. I remember in one time, a friend of mine disappeared for almost a month, went on vacation and I needed that money urgently, but I had no option but to wait for them to return and find the time to send me the money. Which was almost 2 months after I had worked for that money on freelance tasks.
That was it for me, I pledged to find another easier and more secure way to receive payments from abroad to Tanzania, after different methods and trials, nothing was successful until I was introduced to Bitcoin in 2012.
This completely blew me away on how it works and the benefits it will bring to me as a person who had struggled to find an easier and secure way to receive payments from abroad to my Country. I immediately created a wallet on coinbase.com.
At that time Coinbase had just launched and they were doing a promo of giving away 0.10 BTC to it’s new registered members, now don’t be alarmed and think did I just say 0.10 BTC? Today 0.10 BTC is valued at $1000 but at that time, it was only worth $1.
Now came another challenge, to find an exchanger or people that can accept Bitcoin and give me Tanzanian shillings, this was not a big worry for me, because I had belief on Bitcoin and I new after a while a lot of people will too and will immediately open way for new exchangers and traders, which hopefully would make people want to buy btc with my local currency.
Meanwhile I was just accumulating the bitcoins, same time I had started to teach all my customers to also embrace bitcoin, as was the only mode of payment, I accepted. Side profit to me, is Bitcoin’s value was gaining more and more, so accumulating them was a big advantage for me.
The thing was, I found out that, there was a lot of us, facing the same issue and using crypto had made me realize and reunited me with many other people, who had faced a similar problem of not finding an easy and secure method to receive money from all around the world. Crypto and Crypto Exchangers really helped as in achieving something, which was clearly a struggle before.
Now came to the choice of finding a crypto exchanger, that had people from my Country who I could trade my bitcoin and they would give me local currency (Tanzanian Shillings) at first I joined Localbitcoins.com it was the first exchanger that had users who could buy bitcoin with my local currency.
I remember the first time I had traded bitcoin to my local currency on their platform, I was excited and nervous, cause I had no idea what the outcome will bring, will I lose my bitcoins, while I really receive local currency traded directly from crypto? The answer was a short YES :) , it was secure and fast, I think their platform paved a way for other crypto exchangers to also born and do the same thing. The thing is there was a lot of people who needed the same service, a lot of traders who were ready to trade.
Therefore, I did my research to find other crypto exchangers that did the same thing, because I knew that I could always find better deals, this is what I wanted, also to have alternatives, because you cannot just rely on one platform. Then later I found Remitano, it had similar features like Localbitcoin, but Remitano has more options, like to trade other cryptocurrencies and is not just based around one crypto. With plenty more features that are introduced every day.
This was a game changer and I felt like I had finally accomplished the task of successfully getting paid anywhere in the world and being able to exchange it to my local currency within minutes.
Till today I am writing this article, I will forever be thankful for crypto exchangers for doing something in my life and impacting my Country as well, cause there a lot of us who are benefiting from using them and we will continue to use them, cause since 2012 till today this method is still the most easiest, fastest , cheapest and secure way to receive payments.
