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One man's meat is another man's poison

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@belemo
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If you're a Nigerian living in Nigeria, buying and holding cryptocurrency is a no brainer. Other than the fact that I can capitalise on their volatility for short term gains, I can also mine some and sell to fund my life.

However, moving away from the volatility, there's no immediate benefit for holding them. In fact, the naira is quite terrible in the market and does terribly against the dollar on a daily basis.

So it's basically a case of one man's meat being another man's poison. Every day I come online and read posts about people whining about the shitty dollar.

It's sort of funny to me because while fiat ain't shit in the long term, the fiat you're running away from is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Perspective

The dollar might be getting printed to infinity and it might be doing poorly against Bitcoin. However, that doesn't have any direct connection to how Naira performs.

In fact, in Nigeria, the much-derided dollar has been our Bitcoin for a long time. In the past, people just bought dollar and held it for years.

This feeling of assurance is borne out of historical data. If you zoom out of the dollar/naira chart for the past ten years, you'll find a grim image for naira at least.

So if your naira isn't going to be spent in the short or mid-term, there's really no point in holding it. Also, if you don't have any connection with a crypto project or like the tech, you can simply hold Dollar and let the Naira continue it's slide to the abyss.

So for people in Nigeria who live off crypto earnings and have to convert gains to naira before spending, things are different because our gains put the expo on exponential.

Naturally, losses move in the same pattern. Moving from poor to super-rich happens as fast as moving from rich to homeless. I think this also applies to people living in places like Venezuela, Uganda and anywhere with shitty currency.

So in summary, as much as crypto gives us protection from shitty fiat, holding dollar is also an option. In the short term, stable coins give us instant and virtually risk-free gains.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta