June 9, 2021
BY MOHAMED M. SESAY (LUCKY)
I am always puzzled about the security and risk factor hovering around the emergence of the new trade and investment phenomenon that has surfaced in our investment and trade spheres in the country. The uncertainty in terms of security is still pounding my mind. I hear myself questioning: when trading and investing in Bitcoin has gained an euphoric reception from Sierra Leoneans?.
It seems like we have not learnt our lessons as Sierra Leoneans regarding our madcap rush-plunging into an illegal and pseudo- investment just to realize its far-reaching consequences later on.
So many of these pseudo- financial institutions have come and defrauded the people of this country with a colossal sum of money. Among those institutions was the one dubbed “the Wealth Builders”
It came with the pretext of doubling monies deposited by customers and later ended up defrauding Sierra Leoneans billions of Leones and those monies were never recouped. Another Nigerian owned a pseudo-investment company with the name of Rangers Man Power Solution that surfaced in 2012/2013 with the view of securing jobs for Sierra Leoneans in Canada, Abu Dhabi etc. What happened next? Rangers Man Power Solution afflicted and inflicted a debilitating pains on hundreds of Sierra Leoneans-defrauding and absconding with thousands of united state Dollars. How that crooked Nigerian investor who was under police detention, escaped from that police custody and fled out of the county still remains an unexplainable mystry and “D case lef buff” (nothing came out of it)
The unforgivable situation relating to the Wealth Builders and the Rangers Manpower Solution just came to my mind due to the emerging vim and vigor expressed by Sierra Leoneans to invest in Bitcoin and crypto currency related investment.
The Courier just got this thought to ‘vuvuzela’ this crypto currency investment for possible precautionary measures to those unsuspecting citizens intending to get rich overnight, without taking into cognizance the cyber theft and other cyber related crimes.
Let me bring in some analytical and historical perspectives on Bitcoin and other crypto currency mining for the edification of my wider readership so that you all can make an informed decision if at all one chooses to invest in Bitcoins.
Having done my research regarding what truly Bitoin is, I must state that Bitcoin is the most versatile crypto currency around the world and it can be used to purchase goods from an ever-growing roster of merchants that accept Bitcoin payments, including recognizable companies like Expedia, Overstock.com, and Tesla. It can be exchanged with other private users as consideration for services performed or to settle outstanding debts. There are also Business entities in Sierra Leone including Sieratel Mobile Company which have started trading in BitCoin.
Bitcoin is also a comfortable platform that can be used to facilitate illicit activity, such as the purchase of illegal drugs and other ill investment. Bitcoin equally remains a niche digital currency that’s subject to wild value fluctuations.
Despite the wild-eyed pronouncements of its boosters, it’s certainly not a standard investment or trading vehicle in the traditional sense of the word, as is the case with stable national currencies such as the U.S. dollar, the Pound and even our much cherished Leones.
It’s firmly in the realm of alternative investing although, as we’ll see, there are plenty of legitimate reasons not to hold Bitcoin beyond the prospect of making money.
The historicity of Bitcoin date back to the early 1980s, when the algorithms that support modern crypto currency were first developed.
Its closest predecessor was Bit Gold, a proto-crypto currency developed in the late 1990s by Nick Szabo. The first public record of Bitcoin dates to October 2008, when a pseudonymous person or organization known as Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper with the technical outlines for a new, decentralized crypto currency. It is sardonically appalled to realize that the brain behind Bitcoin goes with the false name Nakamoto, his real identity still remains unknown, although speculation centers on a handful of U.S.-based individuals (or various groupings thereof) who were active in the crypto currency movement of the 1990s and 2000s. Nakamoto released Bitcoin’s open-source code in January 2009, marking the beginning of public mining and trading, and ceased public communication shortly thereafter.
The Courier would like to further highlight the inimical effect of trading in Bitcoin especially in this part of the World (Sierra Leone) which ranges from a gigantic risk factor of being hoodwinked and you will have no trace of the person who conned you.
User’s anonymity is highly inevitable by trading in Bitcoin as Bitcoin users are only identified by public keys, or numerical codes that identify them to other users, and sometimes pseudonymous handles or usernames.
Additional protections allow users to further conceal the source and flow of Bitcoin. For instance, special computer programs available to all Bitcoin users called mixing services or tumblers privately swap a specific Bitcoin unit for another Bitcoin unit of identical value, and thereby obscure the source of the owner of a particular Bitcoin account.
Also, the security risks around Bitcoin are the currency’s single greatest drawback, and are worthy of special consideration for anyone considering converting U.S. dollars or Leones into Bitcoin.
The fact that Bitcoin units are virtually impossible to duplicate does not mean that Bitcoin users are immune to theft or fraud. The Bitcoin system has some imperfections and weak points that can be exploited by sophisticated hackers looking to steal Bitcoin for their own use.
Common modes of Bitcoin theft include Stealing of Private Keys wherein, Private keys stored in publicly accessible digital repositories, such as Bitcoin exchanges or personal cloud storage drives, are vulnerable to theft by hacking. The thieves use these private keys to access and transfer the corresponding Bitcoin holdings, relieving their rightful owners of their funds. Exploiting Wallet Vulnerabilities is also doable in Bitcoin trading especially when Some Bitcoin wallets have security flaws that render them vulnerable to attack. As a convenience, some service providers store private keys in the same virtual wallets as Bitcoin funds themselves, allowing hackers to steal the funds and keys in one fell swoop.
Having pinpointed some of the risk factors to trade in Bitcoin, I would like to commend the astute decision taken by the leadership of the Bank of Sierra Leone to unremorselessly extricating itself from the similar crypto-currency investment established in Bo by a company called “My Residual Income Global SL Limited. The preventive measures that was not put in place in the establishment of the Wealth Builders, and the operationalization of the Rangers Man Power Solution which resulted to the hoodwinking Sierra Leoneans of their hard-earned money, is what exactly what the Central Bank is trying to avoid..
I wish my countrymen and women can learn from the circumstantial event that was saturated around Wealth Builders and Make an informed decision about their quest to invest in Bitcoin.