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Currency Bitcoin Price 

falls to $25,000

Hi Friends, 

You can see Bitcoin initially rose to prominence in advanced industrial nations like the United States, and remains most widely used within such countries.

Nevertheless, a discursive theme that has developed is whether Bitcoin can be applied within the context of international development, financial inclusion and bottom-of-the-pyramid business efforts. A number of narratives about why it may be empowering for people in less developed countries has emerged.

This includes

Bitcoin as a means to facilitate low-cost remittances for those seeking to transfer small amounts of money internationally

Bitcoin as a means for an otherwise excluded individual to have a decentralized global bank account, accessible simply by downloading an open source wallet from the internet, rather than having to set up with a formal financial institution

Bitcoin—or the technology that underpins it—subsequently providing the basis for a richer set of financial services

Crypto Crash Latest Update (6/13): Massive fall! Global cryptocurrency market cap crashes to $977 billion 

Bitcoin has the potential to be used as an intermediary currency between other, more dominant, currencies, and thus may be useful for remittances. Rather than using companies like Western Union, a Filipino worker in New York might use a service that transfers US dollars into bitcoins and enables a family member in the Philippines to “withdraw” pesos on the other side.

In order to make this work, there needs to be a liquid market for both dollars-to-bitcoins, and bitcoins-to-pesos. In the case of the Philippines there already are start-ups like Rebit13 and coins.ph. 14 An example in Kenya is BitPesa. 15 International remittances are under stress in various ways. For example, in Somalia the Hawala systems16 have been under threat of being shut down due to concerns on the part of banks and states that they are financing terrorists.

Bitcoin Tumbles to 18-Month Low as US Inflation Impact Spreads

Remittances are a vital element of the Somalian economy, but companies like Dahabshiil that provide this crucial service have been targeted for exclusion by banks in places like the United Kingdom which has a large Somalian population. Bitcoin theoretically could be used to bypass such banks to form an alternative remittance channel. Bitcoin also has potential to facilitate small-scale international commerce. Local merchants in poorer countries may struggle to access international payments systems to sell their goods abroad.

For example, a rural crafts cooperative from Zimbabwe might struggle to set up a website with an integrated credit card payments system, but getting a Bitcoin address might enable them to sell products in exchange for Bitcoin tokens, thereby avoiding traditional e-commerce systems (which often involve having to set up a merchant account with a formal bank).

Bitcoin price crashes amid ‘extreme market conditions’

Provided that a market exists to exchange such bitcoins received in trade back into a usable local currency, this could prove useful. For example, imagine a scenario where a small-scale independent producer of sustainable cocoa butter products sold them to US clients in exchange for Bitcoin tokens that were then redeemed for local—or foreign—currency on a Bitcoin exchange. Likewise, a small-scale non-governmental organization can easily set up to receive Bitcoin tokens as donations.

As of yet, however, there appears to be little robust empirical evidence on the extent to which such use of Bitcoin is occurring. There are many anecdotal examples (found on online forums, media sites and social media feeds) of people using it to make international transfers, or using it to buy goods internationally from small merchants, but no systematic studies beyond proxy studies of Bitcoin users.

As a quasi-bank account for the “unbanked”

In the aforementioned examples, Bitcoin was used as an intermediary currency to facilitate transfers between other currencies. This may assume the user has access to a bank account, but struggles with the cost and difficulty of international transfers or ecommerce systems. It is possible, however, to focus on the Bitcoin system as a type of decentralized bank in itself. If a person has a personal computer or a mobile phone that can be used to download a Bitcoin wallet, they can obtain a public key that represents their account on the global system.

This in turn comes to resemble a quasi-bank account in which you can build up savings. In the context of a country with poor banking infrastructure and reliance on cash, such a technology could—hypothetically—be a safer way to hold money, and a convenient way to transfer money in everyday transactions. Rather than merely be useful for remittance systems, Bitcoin could be an infrastructure for everyday local payments in precarious, informal settings.

BITCOIN PRICE

Bitcoin's price fell 7.73 per cent or $25,296.10. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has been hovering around $30,000 for a month.

Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, fell 9.66 per cent to $1,312.06.

"Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most cryptocurrencies suffered losses over the weekend after a broad sell-off following the data showing US inflation hitting a 40-year high.

The crypto market has been under pressure from the Federal Reserve, hiking the interest rates for the past few months," Edul Patel, Co-Founder and CEO of Mudrex, said.

"With this inflation report, investors seem to have panicked, and the number of crypto liquidations has been high since Friday. The bearish trend may likely continue in the next coming days," Patel said.

In this sense, Bitcoin has potential to complement, or compete with, mobile banking applications. M-PESA has already established itself as a leading mobile banking service in Kenya, enabling up to a quarter of the working population to use mobile phones as a type of digital wallet to transfer currency by using text messages. The politics of mobile banking are tricky, though, involving struggles between regulators, banks and telecoms companies. In Nigeria, mobile money has developed more slowly, partly due to Nigerian banks lobbying regulators to only allow banks to operate mobile money services, rather than telecoms companies (IFC 2011).

Why crypto market is falling 

Bitcoin—by bypassing the incumbent institutions with their internal politics—might offer informal solutions that operate beyond the formal channels used by incumbents. The idea that mobile Bitcoin wallets can serve as a type of bank account intersects with a broader suggestion that Bitcoin can be used by individuals—including richer individuals—as a replacement currency in countries with unstable national currencies. Thus, an individual can escape from their own sinking currency system and climb aboard a different “life-raft” system.

In practice, this is likely to take the form of individuals obtaining Bitcoin as a backup or reserve asset within a diversified portfolio of other assets. Garrick Hileman (2015) of the London School of Economics has drawn up a Bitcoin Market Potential Index, which ranks Argentina, Venezuela and Zimbabwe as the countries with citizens most likely to adopt Bitcoin in future. In the case of Argentina and Venezuela, the dominant factor seen to spur future usage is the perceived risk of inflation in the national currency, while in the case of Zimbabwe the dominant factor is the strong presence of informal black markets. Hileman argues that within such a setting the anonymity afforded by cryptocurrencies can help those who engage in—technically illegal—informal business transactions.