Sooly Kobayashi – Bitcoin Beyond NGU: Ground Truths from the Middle East & Africa

Most Bitcoin conferences in the West talk about what Bitcoin can do — for the unbanked, for the world. Nobody talks about what’s actually happening on the ground. At BTC Prague, I shared what I see every six weeks across the Middle East and Africa — and it’s nothing like the thesis.

Who I Am and Why This Matters

I’m a Lebanese pleb who has been visiting Africa for the past 11 years — every six weeks, for three weeks at a time. I founded Newealth, a Bitcoin-only consulting company that helps Bitcoin companies enter and expand in the Middle East and Africa, and onboards non-Bitcoin businesses — manufacturers, family offices, merchants — onto Bitcoin. I also do selective pro bono advisory for Bitcoin associations and NGOs in Africa, and I serve as a Middle East and Africa nation-state advisor for J3.

Real Adoption Doesn’t Come From White Papers

From most of the Bitcoin owners I’ve known over the years in the Middle East and Africa, none of them read the white paper. None attended conferences. Maybe a handful went to meetups — though in Ghana, people drive three hours just to show up. Real adoption is driven by collapses and the collapse of trust in governments and banks.

Take Lebanon. On October 19th, 2019, overnight, my parents, siblings, neighbors, my grandma — 4.5 million Lebanese — lost access to their own money. Whether you had a billion dollars or a hundred dollars in your account, you could see it on a screen but couldn’t touch it or transfer it. That’s when people started hearing about this thing called P2P and this app through which you could do transactions. That’s how they got onboarded on Bitcoin. That’s how Africa is doing it too.

The Scale and the Constraints

The Middle East and Africa is 71 countries — 54 in Africa, 17 in the Middle East — and two billion people. Sixty percent of Africa’s population is under 25, largely excluded from global financial rails. The unbanked aren’t going anywhere. Informal markets — the mamas selling on the street, the tiny plastic kiosks — make up 70 to 80% of every African market. They move with the rain season, they survive government attempts to push them out. They’re permanent.

But here’s what’s changing: African fintechs are building Bitcoin on-ramps right now. They’re not talking about it publicly because they know the repercussions. If you don’t have a bank account but you have an ID, you can walk to a kiosk, hand over fiat, and get mobile money loaded onto your phone. Those same fintechs are quietly adding Bitcoin rails. There’s so much development happening here that will create blueprints for the West.

Capital Controls Are the Real Orange Pill

I noticed something across every hyperinflationary country I visit: the central bank follows a hidden IMF playbook. To receive IMF funds, countries must remove subsidies and — critically — commercial banks are forbidden from transferring foreign currency outside the country. So if a Bitcoin company orange-pills someone in Congo, they may have dollars sitting in a bank account they literally cannot use online. That’s what capital controls mean. Bitcoin doesn’t just help people save — it helps them move money at all.

Custody, Privacy, and Surviving

Someone on Nostr asked me — with 33 questions total, which I grouped into six categories — whether two billion people can maintain their own keys, implying the IQ might not be up to it. I took a deep breath. The truth is, we’re born in regions with no electricity, no internet, no social security. Our parents teach us to think out of the box from kindergarten — plan B, plan C, plan D for everything. Teaching self-custody and the concept of mistrust in our region is actually much faster and easier than in the West.

Privacy is life-or-death, not a feature debate. In Prague, if you lose your phone, you report it to the police and