I didn't know
@roya ΰ¨ΰ§ story! Wow! π
For many human-rights advocates, the U.S. dollar simply cannot get the job done. Take the case of Roya Mahboob, the Afghan humanitarian [End Page 22] and entrepreneur. As a young girl in Herat, she and her family were forced to flee to Iran after the 1996 Taliban takeover. Eventually, after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Mahboobs moved back to their hometown, and Roya started to see signs of technology emerge in the city. She glimpsed what she described as a "box that could talk to other boxes" inside a cafe, but girls were not allowed to use the computer. Persistent, she eventually convinced the cafe owner to allow her to use it before the shop opened, and eventually became invaluable as a computer-repair specialist. She did the same at the local university and, after graduating, started the Afghan Citadel Software Company, which employed women throughout Afghanistan, helping to publish their blogs and enabling them to do online microwork. Payments, however, were a big problem.
Mobile money never materialized in the country, and PayPal and Venmo were not available to Afghans. Cash was problematic, as male relatives would seize it from women when they came home. But many Afghans had cellphones and occasional internet connections. So, Roya thought, why not try Bitcoin? She had heard about Satoshi Nakamoto's invention from a friend in New York and decided to give it a shot. In the summer and fall of 2013, as she began paying her employees in the new digital currency, one Bitcoin went from being worth $50 to being worth more than $1,000. But then, as the largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, began to collapse and then eventually declared bankruptcy, the exchange rate cascaded in a series of crashes below $200. Roya stopped paying her employees in Bitcoin, but she could not shake the idea of a money that anyone could use, regardless of gender.
One of these early employees was forced to flee Afghanistan. She eventually settled in Germany, where she could access her Bitcoin using her seed phrase (a bit like a password, a seed phrase can be used to recover access to one's Bitcoin). Those coins, now worth considerably more, paid for her new life. Roya's sister Elaha, meanwhile, would buy Bitcoin back from the girls who worked at Roya's company when they needed to buy something and the merchant did not accept the new currency. Elaha saved the coins and later used them, at a twenty fold increase in value, to help finance her education at Cornell University. In 2014, Roya launched the charity Digital Citizen Fund to teach skills to young Afghan women and girls. She made sure to include Bitcoin training, eventually educating more than 25,000 women and girls about the digital currency and other technologies.
In early 2021, Roya could see that the American-backed government in Afghanistan, even though it had been positive for women in her country, would not last forever. She tried to convince her parents to convert some of their savings into Bitcoin, but they would not listen. That summer, Kabul fell to the Taliban in just a few weeks. Most people fleeing lost everything: Their money could not be moved across borders, and [End Page 23] the sudden escape did not provide citizens enough time to liquidate and sell their belongings. So Roya's parents, like many others, suffered financial catastrophe. But not Roya, or the girls who had learned about the digital currency, whose value was stored on the internet and was accessible with a password that could be written down, hidden, sent to a friend abroad, or even memorized.
Today, after more than 1,300 days where Afghan girls have been prevented from going to school, Roya continues to fund underground education inside Afghanistan with Bitcoin. The teachers, who receive the payments directly from Roya and her team, can spend their Bitcoin at peer-to-peer markets or exchange them for cash with local contacts. It is technologically impossible to use the dollar banking system to do this critical work, but with Bitcoin, it is simple.
