How Bitcoin Empowers the Unbanked and Combats Injustice

Plenty of injustice plagues our communities.

For instance, in our world, the unbanked and underbanked don’t have easy access to financial knowledge. All too often, that is reserved for people with wealth and opportunity. If you don’t have these resources shown or taught to you by a professional, you might not have adequate access to the necessary information for gaining financial literacy.

Such education often only comes as income increases. So, how might we increase the income of the unbanked so as to arm them with more knowledge? Many of those at lower socioeconomic levels don’t know what Bitcoin (BTC) is. That knowledge has not matriculated down from the crypto gurus or the finance experts to some of the less privileged economic classes.

The unbanked can be shielded from the ways in which our financial system is wildly unsustainable and plagued with inflation and debt. Money these days is just created “out of thin air” with no inherent value backing this paper currency. The media can sometimes articulate plainly how we have a fundamentally flawed financial system, but often dismisses the specifics that would arm people with more knowledge to navigate this ecosystem.

Bitcoin is the start of a plan to correct this fundamentally corrupt and unsustainable financial culture. Bitcoin represents an idea. A use case. A first pass at evolving a broken system. Bitcoin is a place where every human and every person becomes equal.

When you’re transacting with Bitcoin, your wallets are encrypted, as is your identity. No one knows who you are or how much money you have. There’s no space for prejudice, division or negative treatment. In such a financial utopia, we are not defined by what we look like, what we say, how we talk or how we may be different.

We as a society have a long way to go before implementing such an idea. We need to teach and reinforce why it’s beneficial to invest and save for the future. Or to seek a special tool and round spare change from everyday purchases into Bitcoin for the future, using a dollar-cost averaging strategy to mitigate volatility in a very high-fluctuating but high-reward asset.

In short, the concept of how a little bit of money can compound into a large windfall should be ingrained in our idea of finance. This concept has typically been reserved to the financially privileged. Many people that come from wealthy backgrounds are taught very early on to save money, invest and to build for their future — they’re taught to to use their money and make more money.

But many other communities lack that type of discipline or think they need thousands of dollars to get started. The result of this dichotomy is that 40% of Americans can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense. That means, if 40% of people were to blow two tires on their car, they all either can’t afford it or run out of money covering that expense.

The way to force change on this current topic of inequality and injustice is to empower people with knowledge and easy-to-use tools that assist in investing and saving. When it comes to financial literacy, this includes educating the unbanked about technology like crypto.

Nature adapts and evolves — so should we. We needed to recognize that this is a problem, and we have. The first step to solving any problem is admitting there is one. Now that we have, what can we do to change it? How can we adapt ourselves and our mindset, and change our outlook?

People are pondering different solutions, because the majority — or at least a growing number of people — are finding that the current solution doesn’t work for them. Inflation and debt are immense pain points in our system. Money being created out of thin air and backed by nothing isn’t sustainable.

That’s where the real innovators come in. Bitcoin represents the culmination of a group of people coming together and asking, “How can we improve this?” That’s how humans evolve. That’s how our financial system should evolve: by coming together and asking the question, “What can we do better?”

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.