The past few months, I’ve been digging myself deeper into the world of cryptocurrency, especially bitcoin. Right now, Bitcoin is on the direction of a new all-time high. Yesterday, the first bitcoin futures ETF in the US was approved, and trading for that ETF will be available soon. In my opinion, this is great news and a great signal of further adoption of the bitcoin case.

Personally, I’m interested in the impact bitcoin may have in furthering environmental and humanitarian causes worldwide. One of my favourite essays on it is by Alex Gladstein, and here I present a short summary of his essay. Summary:

In Alex’s essay, he tries to argue the bitcoin potential to further humanitarian and environmental causes. He starts off by discussing some of the potential flaws of the current international development/aid framework.

  1. Aid is distributed by local governments.

    • Potential for corruption and a portion of the total funds being siphoned off.

    • Suppose the aid is not outright stolen; fees in the process of delivering aid trims off the total funds as well.

  2. Aid is often structured in a way that creates dependency.

  3. Aid has not been leveraged enough to help communities and developing nations become energy independent.

To address the first issue, bitcoin’s inherent peer-to-peer capabilities cut out the middle-men. Allowing for direct humanitarianism.

Alex also provides the case that bitcoin mining can allow for remote powerplants to generate immediate revenue, even if the electric grid in developing areas isn’t fully connected/developed.

He gives the example of a hydroelectric plant in the DRC that isn’t fully utilized due to slow electric grid development in the area. The surplus energy can be given to mining bitcoin. This addresses the 2nd issue and 3rd issue, as funds can be redistributed to build the energy grid and empower locals to use newly generated revenue for further development.