If You Could Choose a Currency for Your Savings, What Would It Be?

Actually, the market has already answered that question. Undoubtedly, the US dollar leads the currency race, followed by the euro.

But if you’re a South African, your options are limited (actually not true, as we’ll explain in a minute). South Africans are still subject to exchange controls which allow them to purchase R11 million in foreign currencies a year. Many use this allowance to invest in stocks offshore.

There is a way to dollarise your life without violating exchange controls. You buy US dollar-backed stablecoins like Tether via 80eight. Thousands of Africans are waking up to this opportunity each month.

The World’s Most Used Currencies

What is not reflected in the above table is Bitcoin, which is a tiny fraction of the world’s financial universe. That will change rapidly in the coming years.

If You Could Be Paid in Bitcoin, Would You Accept?

The chart below shows you would be mad not to. Your savings would be nearly 12 times bigger in ZAR terms over the last five years.

Bitcoin in ZAR

Source: Google

Even if you were earning USD, you’d be eight times better off if you received payment in BTC.

Bitcoin in USD

Source: Google

But there are far more assets in the world than there is money, as Bitcoin real estate strategist Leon Wankum notes:

“Currency no longer represents the bulk of the world’s money. That role has been overtaken by asset classes like real estate ($330 trillion), bonds ($300 trillion), equities ($150 trillion), and art ($18 trillion), among others, all serving as stores of value. Yet the store-of-value function is fundamental to a money’s acceptance in trade. After all, who would willingly accept a form of money that is expected to lose value over time?”

The legacy financial infrastructure is not natively compatible with the Bitcoin network, which is decentralised, open, and permissionless. As a result, legacy financial products will increasingly integrate and be exposed to bitcoin, not to reinvent the system overnight, but to gradually harden existing structures.

Over time, this process will lead to bitcoin establishing itself as the monetary singularity, setting a new global monetary standard. This ongoing shift reveals the fragility of today’s so-called stores of value and offers the global economy a rare opportunity to build resilience in the face of rampant fiat inflation, argues Wankum.

Companies are buying more bitcoin than miners are churning out. Demand for bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset is exploding. These are early days. George Mekhail of Bitcoin Magazine foresees an era of “hyper-bitcoinisation” when BTC becomes the default global value system.

Those who think this is pie in the sky should look again at the bitcoin charts above. If I told you five years ago that you would be 12 times better off saving in BTC, you probably would have laughed.

I suspect that laughter is dying down now as reality sets in. Bitcoin serves as a reminder of what sound money truly is. But regaining this understanding will take time. It’s a gradual, generational shift.