Written by Rachel Sun/CoinDesk
When Paul Vigna and I wrote “The Age of Cryptocurrency” seven years ago, its opening lines featured a tale of how the blogging platform The Film Annex had contracted some teenage women attending a digital education school in the Afghan city of Herat and was paying them in bitcoin.
Given the past week’s heart-wrenching images from Afghanistan, the story is a reminder that cryptocurrency, while no guarantee of freedom, can be an aid in the pursuit of freedom. It’s a tool for bypassing oppressive power structures and can play a small but constructive role in helping Afghan women in their religious, cultural and political struggles.
The school was part of a program led by Afghan tech entrepreneur and activist Roya Mahboob, who in 2013 had made Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people – at the age of 25. The Film Annex’s New York-based founder, Francesco Rulli, realized he couldn’t pay Mahboob’s students for their blogs via the legacy international financial system. In Afghanistan’s patriarchal society, a woman’s access to a bank account typically required the intermediation of a man – a father, perhaps, or a brother. So, Rulli set up bitcoin addresses for them and paid them that way.
We opened the book with that story because it seemed like a good way to highlight Bitcoin’s liberating capacity to disintermediate exchanges of value between people. Banks aren’t the only intermediaries it can disrupt; it goes for anyone who exploits the existing centralized system’s dependence on trusted third parties to place themselves between the payer and the payee. In this case, the power it challenged arose from Afghanistan’s sexist socio-political context.
The Film Annex (later renamed BitLanders) was eventually disbanded, but the women’s empowerment project it helped spur went on to make waves.
Tapping her student body, Mahboob formed a team of teenage Afghan girls to compete in a U.S. robotics competition in July 2017. After they were denied visas, prompting an outcry and a congressional petition that led President Trump to intervene and clear them for the visit, they finally entered the event and won a silver medal as part of a courageous achievement award. Four months later, the same team won first prize in a competition in Estonia for a solar-powered robot that can assist poor farmers in the field. The funding for that effort was in part paid for with a bitcoin award that Mahboob had earned earlier that year at the annual Blockchain Summit on Necker Island, which is in the British Virgin Islands.
Fast forward to August 2021. Amid the Taliban’s rapid takeover of their country, fears quickly grew over the fate of the robotics team. The good news, Mahboob told me, is that after an international scramble to save them, 11 of the team had managed by Thursday to get out safely to Qatar, whose government supplied the plane to evacuate them.
Even so, with college-educated women burning their diplomas out of fear of attack from the Taliban, there are hundreds of thousands in danger. Dozens of Mahboob’s staff and educational mentors have abandoned everything they own, she said, and are trying to get access to limited seats on evacuation planes. Even if their names are added to the approved list, they still need to run the gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints seeking to block people from reaching the U.S.-controlled Kabul airport.
A role for Bitcoin or stablecoins, or both?
Bitcoin does not fix this.
Still, at this moment, “Bitcoin could play a very important role,” says Mahboob.
Why? Because the imminent failure of the legacy money system is about to create a vacuum of necessity. That’s something Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as stablecoins are well qualified to fill.
Many bank offices have shut down. Those that are open are seeing long lines of people trying to withdraw cash while there are reports that some branches – and their cash holdings – have been seized by Taliban insurgents. There’s also speculation that the new regime will invalidate the ousted government’s bank notes and replace the money with their own, destroying people’s wealth in the process.
People need money to carry on with their lives or to fund their escape. Foreign donors are eager to get to them, but can’t do so via the banking system. In this context, transferring funds directly to a person’s bitcoin wallet seems like a no-brainer.
If Afghans must embark on an arduous and dangerous escape, at least with cryptocurrency they would have a better way to transfer whatever wealth they have across borders. In decades past, refugees from war-torn areas would deal with this problem by sewing pieces of gold into the hems of their clothes, running the risk of having them stolen by common thieves or corrupt officials. Now, they can simply load up a bitcoin address that’s personally accessible anywhere in the world.
That these options are now even possible in Afghanistan is due in no small part to the phenomenal work of Mahboob, who dedicated a decade to building digital literacy and computer education among women, laying a knowledge foundation upon which bitcoin can now be deployed to bypass the failing legacy system.
“This is why we’ve been working in high schools all these years,” she told me Thursday night. “If young people can learn about computers, they can learn about bitcoin. And now everybody wants to learn how to access bitcoin. They need to.”
Edit ; The way some people think it's inappropriate and insensitive post to the Afghan Situation and it's about promoting crypto.Well,no it's not about that.Its just someone influential from the Afghanistan said how Crypto would have helped people in this difficult time ? I didn't wrote the article,I found the article and gave credit on the top and posted it.I see it as if the same thing happens in some other country in future then people have something available to use in situations like this comes.This was the whole point in sharing this post. If some people didn't liked it,I am apologizing for it, didn't mean to hurt anyone's sentiments.
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