TIL that in Uzbekistan, 30 million population country, people stay in line to get their wages. Throughout few months I spoke with 10 different experts from Uzbekistan and here's what I found...

Their country have something like 30 or more banks. And their banking system until February 2016 and all those quantity of banks still haven't figured out how to provide people ability to send money from 1 city to other city within the country (Even with mPesa in Africa you can do this with mobile phone).

Their capital is called Tashkent (population 2 million) - its the only place where people can buy e-gold type of currency called webmoney (wmz) which is under Russian jurisdiction - these type of electronic money is being sold with 5% extra fee, because people who sell this "WMZ" (1 WMZ equivalent of 1 U.S. dollar) have to bring it from Moscow city (Russia), there is no official way of buying it inside of country.

Uzbekistan government is so oppressive, that they have banned the Skype, Play Market, WhatsApp (being banned by company called Beeline which is international company and huge shame to them).

Their Internet is a little bit cheaper in Tashkent, but all other 28 million people have to pay for their carrier plan 50 megabytes of the Internet-traffic would cost you $2.

The only messenger that works in Uzbekistan is Telegram. Since 2015 I'm developing a Telegram group there http://bit.ly/1qUc2fz you can join it, most Uzbek people know English.

ATM machines in Uzbekistan take 10% fee even if you want to take your own money. People wait their salaries FOR MONTHS to be transferred from employer to employee between their banking accounts. That's why their families is always hungry.

Official government in Uzbekistan lie to everyone about their dollar rate (3000 UZS according to official rates), they blame black dollar market for their internal banking crisis. While the black dollar market (7000 UZS according to real street rate) is the only way for a citizen to acquire U.S. dollars (because you have to wait in line for 6 months to get dollars at 3000 UZS rate which is 2 times cheaper)

I have opened a forum topic at Russian Bitcoin forum where I asked Russian audience to take action towards Bitcoin adoption in Uzbekistan http://bit.ly/1NWdoBB but these Russians seem very ignorant and not supportive at all, their moderation team is a shame (this forum also known as BTCsec it is run by a guy named Ivan Tikhonov) put my topic into the "off-topic" section (like its not important at all - also they are censoring almost everything) while they have all the payment tools to help Uzbek people to start trading.

I am myself spending almost all my spare time to figure out solutions.

Problems with salary could be solved through Bitcoin, because people could get their salary faster if payment could go P2P between their users through LocalBitcoins or through @BTC_CHANGE_BOT which is has the same functionality as LocalBitcoins, but much more economically reasonable, because Uzbek people always have small amount of very expensive bandwidth.

Submitted May 29, 2016 at 06:21PM by blksz http://bit.ly/1qUckD0