Gratitude

As an English Speaker, You Have An Advantage When It Comes to Bitcoin

Photo credit: Jon Tyson

This week, I spoke with Loïc Kassamoto, a UI/UX developer and Bitcoin enthusiast based in Benin.

In our conversation, Loïc shared his thoughts on why Bitcoin adoption is higher in anglophone (English-speaking) African countries versus francophone (French-speaking) ones.

He believes that one of the reasons for this is simply that there are far more educational materials on Bitcoin available in English compared to French.

As a former ESL/ENL teacher, I’m quite aware of just how much of an advantage English speakers have in the world, but I hadn’t fully considered this in regard to Bitcoin until I had this conversation.

So, please keep this in mind next time you have a question about Bitcoin. Understand that, with some digging, it’s relatively easier for you to better understand what Bitcoin is and how to use it than it is for those who don’t speak English.

And if you feel inspired to start digging deeper right now, you can start by downloading the English workbook for the Mi Primer Bitcoin (My First Bitcoin), a Bitcoin education program started in El Salvador.

If you’d like to start reading longer-form texts about about Bitcoin, and money in general, I recommend the following books:

• Broken Money: Why Our Financial System Is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better, by Lyn Alden

• Bitcoin Is Venice: Essays on the Past and Future of Capitalism, by Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers

• Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies, by Nik Bhatia

• The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, by Saifedean Ammous

If your brain hurts while trying to learn about Bitcoin, join the club! (And embrace the pain.)

If your worldview shifts drastically while you learn about the importance of sound money, know you aren’t alone.

And if you begin to feel that you’ve been betrayed by the current financial system, keep in mind you aren’t the first one to feel this way and that there are many working to build a new, more transparent financial system with and on Bitcoin.

By all means, feel the anger and frustration that comes with learning about the problems that many think Bitcoin solves. But also be grateful that we live in an age where this information is available to you — especially as an English speaker.

Mitigating High Fees on the Bitcoin Base Chain

Transacting on the Bitcoin base chain has become more expensive due to the rise of Ordinals.

Source: YCharts

While fees are down compared to a few months ago, they’re still higher than they were through much of 2023. And they’ll probably move trend higher again in the future.

To help mitigate the amount of fees you pay, I recommend the following:

• Make bigger transactions. Keep your bitcoin (BTC) on an exchange or app like River, CashApp, Kraken or Coinbase — which are some exchanges I trust won’t rug you — until you have at least least 1,000,000 sats (currently valued at $416). You may have to pay up to $20-30 to transact on the base chain, so you only want to do so with bigger swathes of sats (fractions of a bitcoin). If you have to pay $20 each time you move $100 worth of BTC, you’ll lose a lot of your savings. The same is true if you’re sending sats from a custodial Lightning wallet like Blink, Wallet of Satoshi (we can’t use either of these in the US) or Alby to the Bitcoin base chain. So, consider making fewer transactions with larger amounts of sats as opposed to more transactions with smaller amounts of BTC.

• Use Lightning-enabled exchanges/apps. River, Kraken and CashApp all support Lightning network, a layer 2 built on top of Bitcoin that enables quick, cheap payments with BTC (New York residents can’t use Lightning with CashApp or any other Bitcoin/crypto app or exchange). If you have a Lightning channel open with a wallet like Phoenix (or if you’re using one of the aforementioned custodial lightning wallets) and you plan to spend the BTC you purchase, then it’s particularly important to use an exchange or app that supports Lightning if you’re looking to send sats to your Lightning wallet and save on transaction fees.

Terminology

If you didn’t understand some of the terminology I used in this section or the previous, notice I linked to sites where you can learn more!

You and you alone are responsible for your Bitcoin education, just as you and you alone are responsible for your investment decisions.

With that said, let’s look at what’s happening in markets…