Tey Elrjula is a tech entrepreneur, a refugee and the author of “The Invisible Son,” now available for pre-sale.
Bitcoin is good for whatever you need. I’ve used it to order pizza and to build a fulfilling career, despite all types of hardships.
I’ve been using bitcoin for years because my family needs it, not because I enjoy speculative trading. In 2013 I was introduced to cryptocurrencies while working with software engineers in the Netherlands. My idea was that if we created money from code, then money would become a way of communication and its value would represent the community.
See also: The Truth About Bitcoin and Hezbollah in Lebanon
I used to send money from the Netherlands to my family in Lebanon twice a month, and the fees were killing me. Even worse, the long waiting lines at money transfer shops were torture. There are still a lot of insurmountable restrictions on money transactions, especially those that exclude large populations around the world.
For example, a sizable segment of people in Saudi Arabia doesn’t have residence permits and are not able to transfer money to their families in countries such as India or Pakistan. Bitcoin doesn’t have those restrictions or involve exorbitant transactional charges.
Later in 2013, I started a Facebook group on bitcoin. I moderated the page and had discussions with many of the 10,000 people who came there, most of whom were from Egypt. I met a lot of interesting people in that group, such as Abdullah Almoaiqel. Abdullah is now the co-founder and partner of Rain, which is the first regulated digital currency exchange in the Middle East. The company is based in Bahrain and operates from Bahrain and Egypt.
Then, in 2014, everything started going wrong. My European residency card expired at the end of that year and there was a war going on back home. People said Hezbollah, the local militia, was fighting to keep ISIS out of Lebanon.
TECHNOLOGY IS HELPING US LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE WE NEED TO TRUST LESS AND VERIFY MORE.
Half of Syria was flooding into the Netherlands back then, and smugglers were active on the other side of Europe. I bought a small book to teach me how to pray in Islam, then started to practice my prayers and listen to the Koran. I also started listening to Sayed Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches, his recitals and calls to fight alongside Hezbollah in Syria. I was surrendering to my fate of being deported to Syria or Lebanon.
Sleepless nights went by, with the Facebook pages continuously broadcasting images of the brutality of war in Syria. I did not want to be part of this.
On Sept. 11, 2014 , 500 migrants lost their lives in the Mediterranean Sea attempting to cross to safe land. It was at that moment I realized how blessed I was to be in Europe, and I surrendered to the idea of becoming a refugee.