It’s important to first mention that Lebanon is a third world country and is enlisted among the countries that are sanctioned by the U.S.A. (although those sanctions are only against a political party and not against the banking sector). Our banking system is considered insecure and quite obviously corrupt to the core where a lot of money laundering happen to the benefit of politicians and terrorist organizations.
Most online wallets do not accept to enroll Lebanese citizens except as an observer. You can create an account but you can not use your credit card or your Lebanese bank account to buy or sell crypto. Most of other exchanges have the same rules towards Lebanon. I have tried at least five of them, and the ones that used to work in the past were denied later on.
So when the Lebanese central bank says that the cryptocurrency is illegal in Lebanon. It’s not that we have the choice of using the world’s platforms anyway as Lebanese. We are already banned from the worlds exchanges.
It makes sense somehow to worry about crypto currency in a country with no regulations whatsoever in this field. Not to forget that even the things that are regulated have their rules broken every day.
Bitcoin can be used in black-markets, it can be used as well for money laundering, for illegal prostitution, drugs and gun markets, etc…
But how could you deprive us from a technology that could have saved us today from the worst nightmare we are facing in the history of our country? Banks closing on our life savings money, and denying our right to use it. A corrupt government going bankrupt and soon defaulting on the next payment deadline of its euro-bonds. A daily speculation of the devaluation of the LBP against the USD from LBP1507.5 to LBP13000 and maybe more.
I could have invested at least half of my money in Bitcoins, stored them in my digital wallet, sold them when needed online in the crypto exchanges and cashed them to any foreign account to preserve my lifetime savings from vanishing from under my nose.
In a throwback to 2017 where the mastermind of the current crash of the Lebanese Market Mr. Riad Salameh, announces the launch of a project intended to create the Lebanese digital currency.
Salameh at that time hadn’t predicted that his financial engineering would possibly destroy our economy and monetary system given that we are governed by corrupt politicians.
A digital asset that exists only in our digital “wallets” bank accounts, and that can only be transferred digitally inside the country and with no possibility of conversion to Fiat money for lack of bank notes. So we’ve waited since 2017 for that Lebanese digital currency to see the light, and it only showed in late 2019 without even the effort of the central bank digital project.
Instead of destroying the economy of our precious country, the central bank should have opened it to the world’s best technologies. It should have enabled the Lebanese entrepreneurs to benefit from the development of the modern world to serve Lebanese fintech startups. Our generation is capable of exporting products and competing with the world’s biggest industries.
Instead, our generation is used to revolting in the streets of Beirut. Late at night before going to bed, after washing our faces from the expired tear gas and storing our Lebanese flag for another day of revolution, we surf LinkedIn for a couple of hours, trying to find a job, somewhere in the modern world, that could provide the least satisfaction to our enormous ambition to conquer the world!
