Fodé Diop, a Bitcoin and Lightning developer from Senegal, has recently shared his thoughts on why Bitcoin is so important to billions of people worldwide that are still victims of monetary colonialism. The developer highlighted the central role that Bitcoin's open-source technology could play in providing financial sovereignty to those in the developing world.
"Today, people like myself have the means and the power to fight, and there has never been a time in the world like that until Bitcoin came in 2008," Diop told Reason[1]. "Everything is possible actually, because money is everything."
Diop was accepted to Emporia State University in Kansas to study engineering and play basketball as a high school senior in Senegal. His father had saved just enough money for his tuition, but before enrolling, their savings were cut in half overnight due to a deal spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and France. To this day, the IMF and the French government still control the currency of 15 African countries.
"If you are in a country where your money might be devalued on the whim of other nations interfering with the local economy, storing your money in Bitcoin might be a better deal to preserve your wealth," said Diop.
Bitcoin didn't exist when the CFA franc, which had been pegged to the French franc for Diop's entire life at 1 to 50, got devalued to 1 to 100 in 1994 after France conceded to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank.
"The cruel irony was that the economic fate of millions of Senegalese was completely out of their own hands. No amount of protest could overthrow their economic masters," wrote the Human Rights Foundation's Alex Gladstein for Bitcoin Magazine in "Fighting Monetary Colonialism with Open-Source Code
