For the morons at the back who need to be reminded. This is only meant for entertainment and is not at all trading advice. I mean that, no hints to mean otherwise from my end whatsoever. Not even the sardonic ‘seriously’ you were hoping for so you could click the buy button. I’m just thinking here.
I went to the bank this morning to renew my debit card so that I can pay for the Quant (h)Edge site’s web hosting and other accompanying stuff like data. I bank with Cooperative bank here Kenya because I had their Jumbo Junior elephant piggy bank whenI was a kid, just right before I knew what different coins were worth, and the few coins I had put in there felt like all the money Id ever need which made me feel safe ( also my dad’s dad may have worked there, or KCB, I’ll have to ask). Anyway, 9am I’m at their Westlands branch looking like a racoon—or other familiar dumpster-diving rascal that comes to mind—in a hoodie from my unkempt dreads, poor sleep and good fashion taste. Despite a lot of annoying n pompous form-filling, which look horrible coz their just black and white photocopies of what I assume were colorful originals, whatshisname in a slightly-trying-too-hard, please-check-out-my-apple-watch (we chatted a bit, nice guy n I like him but c’mon) suit gives me the new card in a few minutes. I loved the speed n convinience, a rare oasis in a country where the default is nothing ever works properly so you’ve become accustomed to expecting and anticipating everything but what should actually happen. It made me wonder if I’ve been wrong to think Coop is a terrible bank and everyone else’s bank is better than mine; maybe they have a ridiculously bad-looking online banking gui but when it comes to the human-to-human stuff, they get it right. Maybe that and maybe they are still collecting interest from very old debts back when people respected banks and took loans seriously. Their new cards are lighter n feel a bit plasticky and cheap, but if you look keenly, it looks like they paid special attention to
all the crucial parts of the cards n cheaped out on everything else including the ink. Add good business sense to the mystery of Coop’s quiet continued success despite how behind the times they sometimes seem.
I put the card in my new wallet I bought so I can go back to carrying actual cash like a normal person and enjoy seeing people’s faces when I give them physical money rather than side-mouthing “nimetuma” while walking away after paying via phone to their M-Pesa based way of receiving business-specific transfers. Everyone smiles when receiving physical cash despite the fact I’m paying them for their goods n services.
I don’t know if it’s because the card is dark green but as I was deciding which slot in my cheap but beautiful (again, I have good fashion taste) Chinese made 2.5$ wallet will be it’s home for eternity, it hit me that the only reason I need this goddam card is so that I can change my KES to USD when paying for stuff outside Kenya where M-pesa’s reach ends. If KES is oil, M-Pesa is the pipeline monopoly (which unlike most African monopolies, is not state-owned, and that’s wht it works well enough but for the few mishaps that become legendary for how noticeable they are at the time, like late last year when everyones Mshwari savings read 0). So how much currency the Kenya shilling has depends on how far M-Pesa can reach, which for me, is not that far…
My first transaction was to send my buddy J. abour $10 in ETH so he could do his newly-discovered polymarket money-making skills. Maybe it’s coz I did a rushed haphazard search but I couldn’t find a way to just download an app, click ‘buy’ on ETH, and quickly breeze through the same M-Pesa deposit process I go through with FX brokers (who all turn ur KES to USD but only Pepperstone and Exness’s rates have agreed with my stomach of everyone I’ve dealt with). It sucked, but no worries, I had my trusty card. No cigar either, OTP for the 0 usd handshake when adding cards the first time failed. I again felt Coop must have an outdated system. Had to send J. the bad news but was also glad I wondering in the back of my mind how the polymarket-money sausage is made (I really don’t wanna know what you—and I say this endearingly—psychos are doing. So yeah, looks like my KES has less currency than I thought. If I can’t pay in USD from my M-Pesa or bank card, how am I supposed to use my ‘worthless’ money in my cyber-centered world where everything I pay for is in USD, and I’m not even thinking of Netflix and Spotify, who surprisingly and surreptitiously figured out M-Pesa millennia ago.
My mind immediately starts churning solutions to every problem I layout in my mind. Just use crypto to pay for everything dumbass, I heard. But wasn’t the government something-something locked crypto wallets.. Binance.. seems serious.. I said, recalling something I had quickly scrolled by on Twitter quite recently. I don’t want the government watching my crypto payments even though it would all be pretty mundane stuff that came up in my work, I retorted. It won’t matter coz everything will be on the up-and-up, plus.. it’s the only way, came the smug response. I understood what I meant by only. I didn’t mean literally, just that anything else would be too much unnecessary hassle which you would find yourself trying thanks to some aggressive marketing you’d been seeing but not paying attention to. I thought about M-pesa, the Kenya shilling’s preffered way to move, if no one wanted to bother intergrating M-Pesa, why can’t M-Pesa just do us all a favour and allow us to hold crypto in our M-Pesa wallets. It would be a nice addition to their swanky new OneApp or MyOne, something cliche involving the word One that your forced to gag or eyeroll so hard and immediately forget it, but it will stick from repetition someday, which will be a sad day but there are bigger problems in life than an annoyingly named app you use all the time in ur day-to-day living. It sounded feasible and not that hard to do in my mind. Isn’t crypto open source or something. Problem solved, easy peasy, dusting-my-hands, handshake with important bigger guy, pat-on-the-back job well done. I’m sure there are details I’m missing that explain why it hasn’t been done but I suggested it on Twitter still just incase I was wrong.
That would solve half the problem, a lot of people accept crypto already, it’s easy to setup your payments to accept all crypto, or so it seems because those who accept crypto accept a staggering amount of them that it feels like they take all crypto. The next problem would be switching crypto to usd. You’d have to send the crypto to another place then sell it in the other place for USD, and who knows what rate your going to get in a rather illiquid and volatile side of the money-world. Okay, I’m exaggerating, your money is not going to lose value in the 5 min all these conversions happen, but this is finance where theoretically and probably one day, it COULD
But assuming they did, and I had cryptocurrencies in my M-Pesa app ready to go at all times n for next to nothing, which is saying a lot because M-Pesa fees are quite cheap you barely notice Safaricom making half of their record-breaking 100bn shillings profit in real-time. Say I had the crypto, why would I need KES? Now you’d send everyone you’re dealing with crypto, both here at home and abroad. You would slowly forget the very quiet but familiar KES in the background as you used M-Pesa. It would be long forgotten but not missed. The only time you’d remember KES is when you needed to mentally appraise the value of your crypto. Whether KES was up or down since you last did this wouldn’t matter, except the small ‘yay’ or ‘boo’ ur heart did as part of our collective human behavior. But the convenience you gained and have since then experienced would make u say thank God it was done.
I stopped my thinking there but the parting shot was a strong impression that the USD will (probably or at least foreseeably) never see this fate even in the made up scenarios in my head. Regardless of where your money comes from, if you want to spend it in the real world, you will have to buy dollars, and even if you don’t, you’ll agree on the price for your wierd little transaction by referencing the Dollar.
This is not a new narrative. I’m sure I’ve read it in some form several times in different newsletters. But I had never really felt it. With AI happening, and everyone can now do everything if they want to, with the help of AI, all of us are paying for the same stuff, in USD. And if I, who had to send very many emails back-and-forth with Wise to prove my residential address, and who had roughly $20 in my account this morning but, after much deliberation and sacrifice, decided to pay painstakingly find a way to pay things needing USD, then everything they’re saying about the dollar’s imminent (and currently ongoing ) collapse is wrong.
And then you have an economy that just won’t quit.
Again, let me remind you that this is only meant for entertainment and is not at all trading advice. And I mean that, no hints to mean otherwise from my end. It’s just creative writing.
Sorry for the typos n other stuff I should have edited out before clicking send. I wanted to tell you a story, n I think I did.