Billionaire investor Tim Draper recently took a trip to Sri Lanka to promote bitcoin to the nation’s central bank only to be kicked out unceremoniously.
Tim Draper Tries to Bring BTC to Sri Lanka
While he wasn’t kicked out in a literal sense, regulators of Sri Lanka didn’t welcome Draper with open arms and commented that the use of crypto or bitcoin would never occur within the nation’s borders. Draper initially sought to push bitcoin as a financial tool that could not only be used to pay for goods and services, but to fight off rampant corruption, which is relatively prominent in Sri Lanka. In his opening statement to the bank, Draper said:
I come to the central bank with decentralized currency.
Sadly, it was not to be, as the bank’s governor Nandalal Weerasinghe commented:
We don’t accept… Adoption of 100 percent bitcoin won’t be a Sri Lanka reality ever. We don’t want to make the crisis worse by introducing bitcoin.
Draper tried his best to make the most of bitcoin and promote it in a positive way during his meeting. He even wore a bitcoin tie. He further made the argument that:
A country known for corruption will be able to keep perfect records with the adoption of bitcoin.
The work did not pay off, and things ultimately failed as Sri Lanka has made it clear it will not move in the direction of the world’s number one digital currency by market cap.
It’s disappointing to see that while BTC and many of its digital counterparts were initially created to serve as payment tools, many individuals, governments, companies, and other entities refuse to give it a fighting chance against checks, credit cards, or fiat currencies, the reason being that it’s extremely hard to understand when bitcoin and its crypto family will go up or down when it comes to their prices. Many stores and companies, for instance, have been reluctant to say “yes” when it comes to accepting crypto payments for this reason, and to a degree, we can’t blame them.
$250,000 in Nine Months?
Consider the following scenario: someone walks into a store and buys $50 worth of merchandise with bitcoin. For one reason or another, the store doesn’t trade the BTC into fiat right away and about 24 hours go by. From there, the price of BTC goes down and that $50 becomes $40. The customer gets to keep everything he or she bought, but the store has lost money in the end. Is this a fair situation? Not everyone thinks so.
Not long ago, Draper – always the bitcoin bull – predicted that the price of BTC would spike to $250K before the end of the year. He also stated that women will likely aid the crypto space the most in the future.
