What is the current state of #Bitcoin Adoption in Indonesia🇮🇩?
- Government has love and hate relationship with Bitcoin and crypto in general. Central Banks hates it, Ministry of Commerce loves it, Tax Office loves it. The Muslim Council hates it because of political reason.
- People in general see bitcoin as an asset class, which they hope to buy low and sell high. Many bought their first bitcoin in 2021 bull run
- A lot of people trade crypto, either through CEX, P2P, Defi but more accumulate their profits either in Bitcoin or USDT
- Many fall into scams under the name of “Bitcoin” through app, mining, trading bot or third party service. These scams are actually ponzi schemes and money game. Hence #bitcoin got a bad rep. Gambling is illegal in 🇮🇩 so people gamble in shady businesses instead
- Universities and schools started having discussion about bitcoin, they conducted seminars and online classes about #bitcoin . We see high schoolers already invest in Bitcoin as soon as they can open an account
- Indonesian loves anything trendy, that is why they are suckers for buzzwords such as NFT, Web3, Defi, Blockchain.
Indonesia has a “FOMO” culture
- When it comes to digital payment, the government QR system dominates the market and the adoption is high. This present an opportunity for Lightning ⚡️ payments app and using this QR for offramp
- The highest adoption of Bitcoin payments comes from Indonesian freelancers who have clients that want to pay them in Bitcoin.
Many freelancers still rely on PayPal, Payoneer, and Wise. However, they would prefer an app that has small fees and a good exchange rate.
- In 2016 many businesses in Bali accepted bitcoin payment but then got shutdown by the government in 2019
The central banks had a campaign to make sure that rupiah is the only legal tender
- Despite the ban, an Indonesian comedian artist sold his apartment in exchange for #BTC or #ETH
- Ex Ministry of Trade Gita Wirjawan is one of the big proponent of Bitcoin. He is not a maxi but appreciate bitcoin deeply and had a podcast with Saifedean Ammous
- And recently Ridwan Kamil, the West Java Governor will be a speaker at Bitcoin Conference in Miami talking about mining
In conclusion, to enable massive bitcoin adoption, what we need is
- more apps that enable bitcoin payment and bitcoin offramp/onramp
- more high profile people to be orange pilled like celebrity or politicians
- more education in a grassroots level
This is one of a reasons why we are hosting Indonesia Bitcoin Conference. We want to have more discussions and become a platform to ignite more adoption.
🗓️: Oct 26-27
🏝️: Bali, Indonesia
👉Early bird: indonesiabitcoinconference.com
We will have
- Lightning Hackathon
- Main Stage
- Panel
- Networking
- Exhibitions
- Bazaar
- Art show performance
- After Party
- and many more
Join us
