In the 14th century, hawala was being used to facilitate trade on the Silk Road, a trade route that involved much exchange between countries from Asia to the Mediterranean and North Africa — not to be confused with the Silk Road website.
As we move into a new era, I have a growing suspicion that trade routes will become unbound from archaic laws, and freedom between markets and large populations will catalyze the growth that the world desperately needs.
Before my family immigrated to the United States, my father, like his father before him, used open-source tools to protect his property in Ethiopia. Dubbed “Kalash” from its Russian translation, this tool was indispensable for various groups within this past century.
My father was a classically trained engineer during the 1970s and worked in search of petroleum deposits among unforgiving land formations in the Ogaden Region of Ethiopia that borders Somalia. He sporadically reminds me about energy data that was falsified in the name of an imagined collective during that period. In 1994, my father and our family were awarded a “diversity visa” and relocated to the U.S. For the next decade or so, working as a technician on the manufacturing floor at Tyco International in Silicon Valley was much more lucrative than digging empty ditches for oil barons in East Africa.
At present, the information and data wars in Ethiopia are most evident in ancient cities with various reinforcing cleavages and an inability to protect their properties and their lives. The Marxist/Leninist regime removed weapons from my parents’ home as they came into power throughout the cities and villages of Ethiopia. Today, I suspect open-source tools of peace and the patient, God-fearing education we practice daily will accelerate our gradual liberation.
Education
“For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” — Ecclesiastes 9:4
Officially crowned in 1930, the most peculiar appointment of the late-Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was that “He held the portfolio of Minister of Education in his own hands until 1966.” Historians today are left with his relentless pursuit of education, donating his palace to the nation’s first university and sending students into study abroad programs all around the world. His Imperial Majesty was if nothing else an educator of principle and dignity.
Less than 10 years later, after easing the educational influences of Ethiopian students, a flurry of Soviet-sponsored and student-led protests, seasoned with an unhealthy reaction of American-led intervention, spurred a dark age from which we have yet to fully emerge.
From 1974 to 1991 Ethiopia became a communist state . At the base layer of our modern education, our successes (and modern disappointments) are captured best by Dr. Aklilu Habte as he lectured at the Library of Congress — the context of which is that he left Ethiopia shortly after the Marxist-Leninist revolution. The content more directly discusses compromised quality at institutions of higher education. Politically appointed educators, as our nation’s first Minister of Education repeatedly observed, is a very troubling and worrying trend. Today, Ethiopia’s education has been arguably debased beyond recognition.
This separation of principles from the monetary base continues to cause a disproportionate amount of pain in Ethiopia. Most evident and most paralyzing may be the debasement of human life. I suspect this may have something to do with the state-sponsored historical legacy of ethnic federalism. It may be beyond mercy that in the ’90s (just a few years following Rwanda’s history) our institution-led leaders requested Ethiopians to identify themselves beyond name and the various information fields we are used to in the West. Instead, in Ethiopia, we must always be reminded that the ethnic identity of each citizen was branded on state-issued identification cards. This statist culture of control and labeling at the ethnic level equates to racism and catalyzes violent tendencies to unprotected nationality’s tribes in rural Ethiopia. It is my view that digital, bot-like and undefined identities react in similar wave patterns and frequencies across networks and channels. Dishonesty at centralized institutions will continue to misrepresent price and information into a cascading flame. Research into the algorithmic decisions of certain technologies and the sudden flare of identity-based massacres should be exhaustively and apolitically studied. In my limited capacity, I also suspect there is an upsetting relationship regarding various keywords drilled into charity-led recruits — most observable to the Ethiopian citizen are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” For context, these “SDGs” were set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and are intended to be achieved by 2030.
In my view, the United Nations has failed to achieve various milestones of progress as an organization. Furthermore, the United Nations and its countless offices, projects and crosscutting programs can no longer function in any civilized trajectory due to an inability to fully account for direct employees and beneficiaries of their funding. Additionally, the location and activities of its various digital and physical assets are difficult to secure against attack vectors, both domestic and foreign.
Remedies should be considered given these UN-held assets are sitting in an arguably unproductive manner and further draining our nation’s weak economic growth. As we conclude on the effectiveness of these institutions, my view is that the meek students at Qala Bitcoin are good and will inherit the world, as they are perfectly positioned to become future contributors and maintainers of Bitcoin.
Recommendations
“Only a few years ago, meetings to consider African problems were held outside Africa, and the fate of its peoples were decided by non-Africans. Today, … thanks to the conference of Accra and now of Addis Ababa, the peoples of Africa can, at long last, deliberate on their own problems and future.” – Haile Selassie I at the Summit for the Charter of the Organization of African Unity in 1963.
Location-based information campaigns and institution-led propaganda will continue in this wicked, digital world. As the bounty widens, outsized rewards for productive activities will naturally conspire. Unintentional actions and political events will guide us toward any real institutional collapse as needed. Personal values will begin to take on a moral paradigm and treaties de jure will need to be revisited at every level.
I may be blinded by patriotic duty or my background in audit services, but I remember that in 1963, Emperor Haile Selassie gifted more than 200,000 square meters of land to the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Over the next few decades, these assets were transferred to the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa (UN–ECA). The OAU quietly dissolved to become the Africa Union (AU). Today, the AU painfully sits in a Chinese-built headquarters that uses Huawei-sponsored cameras.
I propose that any of these assets, deemed to be unproductive or misplaced by Addis Ababa’s land administrators, should be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The amount raised will most definitely support Ethiopia’s climb out of debt. I also suspect that this natural and sudden evolution will yield a surplus to further investment in hydroelectric power facilities as part of Ethiopia’s continued push to become energy independent. Project Mano and the Ethiopian Bitcoin community would like to harness this energy into the Bitcoin network. As we see continued moral collapse on one extreme and a financial collapse on another, suspended human energy will reveal itself and add value to our growing world.
As these truths and events unfold, people in the Global South are faced with new tools. Take back custody in every sense and be completely unapologetic to old paradigms as a matter of international consensus. These conclusions are not new, but may need some added urgency given the quickly increasing annual trade deficit within Ethiopia and many countries in similar conditions.
This is a guest post by Kal Kassa. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
