The Biggest Announcement NOBODY Is Talking About!(The 4th Largest Country Announced THIS In Miami)
The Global Bitcoin Race Is Heating Up!
The 4th largest country in the world has just announced its plans to become a ‘’Bitcoin heaven!’’
That’s exactly what Ridwan Kamil, a governor of the country announced on Friday, at the Bitcoin Miami Conference!
If you want to watch some highlights from the speech, I played a few of them in my YT video that I made on the topic today.
Now who is this guy?
Ridwan Kamil is the governor of West Java and is responsible for leading over 50 million people in the most populous province of Indonesia.
Indonesia is an enormous country with over 270 million people living on its islands.
Has Indonesia just opened the floodgates wide open in the global race of countries racing to integrate Bitcoin into their society first?
Is this another signal that China and the global South have performed a Bitcoin backflip?
To answer those questions, let’s begin to break this announcement down, and highlight why it should be getting more attention than it is currently getting.
This announcement is HUGE because Indonesia is the 4th largest country in the world, and has a population of 277 million people, making it more than 40X the size of El Salvador, which was the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender in 2021.
Indonesia is also the largest economy in South East Asia, and they currently have the 16th largest GDP in the world, currently producing around $1.5 Trillion.
Which for comparison again, is 50X bigger than the tiny $33B economy of EL Salvador.
Now, to understand whether this announcement could trigger a wave of Bitcoin adoption, and to learn which country could be next to make Bitcoin legal tender…… we need to understand WHY Indonesia made this move.
Before this announcement was made, a 2023 survey estimated(keyword) that ‘’crypto adoption’’ in Indonesia was already amongst the highest in the world!
The study, titled "Global State of Crypto Report," found that 41 percent of Indonesians, aged between 18 and 75 years old with an income of more than $14,000 per year, own crypto assets.
It’s worth noting the survey only looked at a sample size of 30,000 people globally, which is a relatively small number, but it’s still far larger than some of the other surveys done in the space.
The study also found that Indonesians are far more optimistic about the future of decentralized money than other people surveyed in the West!
So, adoption and acceptance of crypto were already high in Indonesia, well before this announcement was made.
This is one of the many similarities that Indonesia shares with El Salvador.
Let’s remember, El Salvador was also seeing grassroots adoption of Bitcoin many years before Nayib Bukele made the currency legal tender.
The Bitcoin Beach project for example was created in 2018, 3 years before Bitcoin was legal tender.
Now there are a number of different reasons why Bitcoin adoption in Indonesia is one of the highest in the world.
The biggest reason is that over 60% of Indonesia are unbanked!
They’re also a relatively poor country which is highlighted by the point that they receive a large amount of money from cross border remittances.
The number of remittances the country has received since 1983 has grown exponentially!
For a country that heavily relies on cross border payments, the 2020 lockdowns were a massive strain on their economy.
The 2020 crisis reminded Southeast Asia of the significant pain they’ve felt in their lifetimes.
The second reason SE Asia is predisposed to adopt Bitcoin and find an alternative is that they’ve lived through the late 1990s Asian financial crisis.
This crisis destroyed the purchasing power of Indonesians and has predisposed them to be more open to an alternative form of money.
Inflation in Indonesia spiked up to 58% in 1998 at the height of the crisis.
The US Dollar even rallied by 600% against the Indonesian Rupee in the space of only one year, indicating the Rupee lost 86% of its value against the US Dollar in only 12 months.
We can also see that many other currencies in the region also suffered immensely in the late 1990s, losing a tremendous amount of value against the US Dollar.
This was because of the brutal US Dollar bull market in the 1990s, which decimated the entire region and created the infamous Asian Financial Crisis.
We can see that since our world entered a global fiat standard in 1971, the USD has gone through 3 major multi-year bull markets.
Each bull market led to a large financial crisis in an overleveraged region of the world.
1980s LATAM crisis- The DXY rose from 84 to 164
1990s Asian currency crisis- The DXY rose from 78-120
2020s GFC 2.0?-The DXY has risen from 68 in 2008 to over 100 currently…
Is this US Dollar bull market over, or just getting started?
So, I believe the global south was already predisposed to find an economic alternative, and the recent global economic calamities could help to explain the interest of the region in Bitcoin.
Indonesia experienced its first recession in 20 years when the events of 2020 rolled around.
The US aggressively raising rates faster than ever before in history, is beginning to have a huge impact on the world, and is beginning to give SE Asia flashbacks to the 1990s....
Inflation is beginning to rise in SE Asia for the first time since the 1990s crisis, which was triggered by the US raising rates.
Those who have been screwed the most by this system, are leaving first.
This is why Bitcoin adoption is highest in Asia and Latin America, and lower in Western countries.
This is also why the Association of South East Asian Nations(ASEAN) recently announced that they’re sick of the US Dollar, and they’re actively looking for alternatives.
The Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, even reminded everyone to remember what the US did to Russia’s treasury reserves.
This helps to explain their recent de-dollarization attempts.
Not only do the other countries in the region want off the USD, but they’re actively hurtling towards the solution!
Indonesia is not the only country in SE Asia that’s beginning to turn its attention to Bitcoin.
We can see that the global south has 6 out of the 10 countries that have the highest Bitcoin adoption.
This chart doesn’t even include some of the more recent Bitcoin backflips in SE Asia.
The Kingdom of Bhutan shocked the world this week when it was exposed that the small country had been secretly buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin since 2019.
The only reason we found out this information was because of the recent BlockFi and Celsius bankruptcy filings, that were recently released which showed that the tiny nation’s $3 billion sovereign wealth fund was a customer at both companies.
Once these revelations were recently released, Bhutan doubled down and announced that they had also been mining Bitcoin since 2019, when it was under $5,000 a coin.
They even went one step further by announcing that they're expanding their mining ops by $500M.
Now, Bhutan isn’t the only country in the region making a Bitcoin play.
Let’s turn our attention to another one of China’s neighbours, the tiny country of Laos.
They actually banned Bitcoin in 2018, but they reversed that decision in 2021, announcing they were going to run a Bitcoin mining operation.
The government authorized 6 different companies to begin Bitcoin mining within the country.
The government even expected to make an enormous $260 million of profit from the venture, which was projected to boost their revenue by over 20%.
Last but not least, the Philippines are another really fascinating country when it comes to Bitcoin adoption in Southeast Asia.
They receive the fourth highest amount of money from remittances in the world.
This is one of the reasons why they’ve also got one of the highest rates of Bitcoin adoption in the world.
The South East Asia Bitcoin plot thickens even further when we remember that Hong Kong recently announced its goal to become a ''crypto hub.''
Interestingly, Chinese government officials have been spotted at many recent HK Bitcoin events.
They've also been interacting with the organizers of the events, and indicating China is on board with Hong Kong’s plans...
This announcement is huge, Indonesia is another poor country, and this is the incentive of adopting Bitcoin provides.
So which country is next?
Why are so many presidents currently running as a Bitcoiner?
Will this trigger a wave of countries racing to make Bitcoin legal tender?
What’s happening in the presidential elections in Argentina, Mexico and America will help us answer those questions:
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