Roberto is an emigrant working in Madrid. He emigrated to Spain from Ecuador in 2015 in order to provide for his family. He is currently making roughly 750 EUR a month(855 USD aprox.), less than the minimum wage in Spain. Each time he sends money back, he pays a fee, which, in his case, costs him about $10 for every $250 he sends as he keeps the rest to pay rent and live. He uses Western Union.

This doesn’t seem much, but for a person making this little, it sums up. Talking with him, I made him realize he spends around $120/year in transaction fees.

“Wow that’s a lot of money!” my humble friend states. “But I guess it cannot be helped”.

Oh, but it can.

One of the core ideas behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is that there is no central authority auditing or controlling transactions. This means each transaction can occur almost for free.

Another example of a clear use case is emigrant remittances, which represent our second biggest source of income, after oil exports.

Ecuadorians living abroad remit about $2.5 billion USD to their families back at home. Of that amount it is calculated that around $100 million is paid in transfer fees. YOUR WELCOME Western Union.

That is $100 million dollars each year not making it into the Ecuadorian economy, and yes, around $120 less to more than one family. And this is without taking into account the fee for currency conversion.

If this wasn’t enough, as a dollarized economy, Ecuador also have the problem of lack of cash in the streets. So what we do? We import bills and coins. Yehp you heard(or read) it right.

According to ex-president Correa and the Central Bank of Ecuador, our country spends a considerable amount in importation fees of bills and coins from the Federal Reserve Bank.

It reads: “Importing bills costs Ecuador $10 million/year”

This is when the ban begins to sound astonishingly absurd.

The Ban

Ecuador banned bitcoin and other digital currencies in July 2014, while establishing guidelines for the creation of a new, state-run currency, in what many analysts saw as a first move to remove the so-criticized dollarization.

The government expected massive adoption of their state run, centralized ‘digital money’!

Instead they ended up with yet another money black-hole and an obtrusive law that has hindered, what could potentially have being, the first wide adoption of a decentralized running economy.

In a desperate attempt to salvage their sinking(or already sank) boat, they make another move: to pass control of their digital centralized currency to the private banking system.

But what prevents the Government to seize control back anytime they want to? Sneaky.

A new hope

This year Ecuador had a change of government. Although the same political party remains in power, recent changes and discrepancies with the previous president makes us hope for a possible change in mindset and a potential ban lift.

There is an on-going petition to the National Assembly for the law to be revised and the ban to be lifted here

Even though this law has not been that much respected, as many local business have decided to ignore it and accept bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, nevertheless, it still limits the possibility of a wider massive adoption and further realization of bigger projects around this technology.

In 2014 a professor, a group of students and me, embarked in what was to be the first project to attempt to eliminate cash through the use of bitcoin for the agriculture sector.

The project consisted basically in the creation of a small bitcoin fund that was going to be given away to some selected local farmers, distributors, suppliers and some local stores. The intention was that they only used bitcoins to pay for their supplies, and in turn they would accept only bitcoins for their products or services.

The second part was to create a local distribution center, where we where going to accept bitcoins for every other need not covered by the bitcoin-circle we had created.

So, if a farmer needed diesel for their truck, and they could not find any station that accepted bitcoin, they would come to the distribution center and ask for diesel prepaid cards, and so on with every other need they had.

The idea was to do this at first, but we expected that, gradually, many other local distributors where going to start accepting bitcoin to stay competitive, as many farmers would prefer to buy where bitcoin was accepted.

The law was passed, and the project halted.

Conclusion

The new rise of general interest in blockchain technologies gives us hope that the day where we finally have an open, decentralized, inclusive economy will come. This can be achieved, when the general public starts believing and using this technology in their daily lives, and when we finally can push the speculators out by reducing the current volatility.

It may be a long way to go, still, the longest path, is the one that has not started. So lets start!

Consider donating and signing our petition

Donations will be used in legal expenses and campaigning costs, and the eventual restart of the project described above.

BTC: 18YxqhcXnRNP3acuA5p3FRZgJEsESZ3YVu

ETH: 0xA8E43F40EF568B5BcC9Cfd2B8ED1173BcCd4a24E

https://www.change.org/p/asamblea-nacional-por-favor-se-levante-la-prohibici%C3%B3n-de-criptomonedas-en-el-ecuador

References:

http://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2017/07/14/nota/6278638/seis-meses-e-dinero-pasaria-banca-privada?utm_source=fb-tw-gp&utm_medium=social&hootPostID=6fe9100eb6359e0cb2c54d7d5460645b