Working with One.Surgery and innovating in Tunisia: An experience of receiving Bitcoin Cash payments

One Surgery is a dedicated platform to support the progression of safe surgery worldwide. This article is from the perspective of a One.Surgery team member, describing how One.Surgery is paying its international team with BCH and the positive global impact it can have...

I started as a global health enthusiast and global surgery advocate in 2019 when I was a final year medical student in Tunisia. I came across One Surgery and became passionate about their projects, aiming to provide world-class educational and research tools to those improving surgical standards across the world.

So I began sharing my own voice in their magazine (1) about my experience with patients undergoing surgery in Tunisia under local anesthesia and how they faced anxiety in the operating room. We used music therapy to calm their nerves and it was so amazing to share this experience with the world through the magazine (https://voices.one.surgery) - as well as learning from other inspiring global surgery stories (2).

In addition, the One Surgery platform made me excited to share my medical blogs, and it was the first time I received Bitcoin Cash (BCH) for my blog posts through their rewards programme (https://one.surgery/blog). Suddenly, I started a new personal journey in cryptocurrency that I had never discovered before!

I set up a wallet to store my Bitcoin Cash so I could start transacting on the network and on the back of a very eventful 2020 – culminating in our successful crowdfunding campaign to develop a cryptocurrency-powered research journal, I officially joined the One.Surgery team to achieve the goal of the their 2021 research roadmap (4).

We are now a dedicated international research team, fully funded for one year by the Bitcoin Cash crowdfunding campaign (paid for our work in BCH) and we are working together to succeed this year.

The payment was so easy in BCH because cryptocurrency is not bound by geography as it is purely internet-based; its transactions are stored in a database called blockchain, which is a group of connected computers that record transactions in a ledger in real-time. The difference between cryptocurrency and, say, Visa or Mastercard, is that a cryptocurrency doesn’t need middlemen, and transactions rely on the internet, which means they can happen anywhere in the world.

With my first salary in BCH, I exchanged it to Tunisian Dinar and used it to create my own medical startup, innovating in e-health in Tunisia. From March I decided to keep saving BCH, hoping to invest it more to promote innovation in digital health in Tunisia.

I know this is the currency of the future but it is volatile now. However, interest in cryptocurrency is growing steadily in Africa, especially in Tunisia. Some economists say it is a disruptive innovation that will blossom on the continent. “Africa is rarely mentioned among the largest markets for cryptocurrency, but it may be set to steal a march over other markets,” says Rakesh Sharma, a business and technology journalist. (5)

I maybe one of the first people in the world that is paid with Bitcoin Cash (for non-crypto work), and definitely in the surgical field. This gives me the enthusiasm to continue the roadmap with One Surgery and make relevant research more accessible to those that would benefit from it the most, bringing innovative technology to surgical care worldwide, including advances in treatment and research collaboration.

References

1. Voice of One.Surgery

2. A New Decade Voices of One Surgery Issue-8-February-2020

3. The global surgery movement and cryptocurrency

4. One Surgery 2021 Research Roadmap

5. Cryptocurrencies: adoption and transfers on the rise in Africa