tl;dr: Nigeria may be the first, but it won’t be the last. The threat to sovereign currencies around the world.

A debate in the Nigerian Senate made waves among the Crypto Twitterati a few weeks ago and it won’t come as a surprise as to why.

And it wasn’t just one senator. It was multiple.

I think we’re going to see this scene play on a repeating loop for the next few years, particularly in countries with a history of corruption and financial mismanagement.

Bitcoin, as a form of private money built with decentralized software, is going to “eat” (in the words of Marc Andreesen) public money backed by the state and with guns.

Many governments will invariably fight this with bans and crackdowns, like India.

But it will ultimately prove futile unless the government also shuts down the Internet, which is will lead to revolt.

Other countries, however, will begin to embrace the inevitable and, I would even wager, there are a few central bankers out there in some vulnerable economies that are using their dollar and gold reserves to do what Elon Musk did…and put some amount of their holdings into Bitcoin.

I saw a report that Kenya was considering it, for example, but it looks to be dubious at this moment, based on some of the links. Hard to say.

I saw a chart many moons ago that said “if the central banks of Africa had each put $1 million of their reserves into Bitcoin in 2013, here’s what they would have today,” but I couldn’t find it.

The point is…the central banks of countries like Nigeria and Kenya (and even India) are running into the inevitability that their people are going to trust Bitcoin more than they trust their own currency.

Sure, a ban could be enacted, but that will just open peer-to-peer black markets, which is not in the interest of personal safety.

Today, Bitcoin is the world’s 5th most valuable private entity, after only Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

It’s also the 14th most valuable currency.

These are forces which can’t be stopped.

It’s going to be fascinating to watch what happens in African central banks as this realization dawns.