I know physicians in Egypt that, after their shift, go home and stack physical dollar bills. They earn no interest. If a thief or a fire takes their home, they're done.

They have looked around at the monetary technologies available to them, and decided that this was the best one: stacks of paper claims issued by the global hegemon that they're not particularly fond of, stored in their own home rather than trust the banks. What a sad state of affairs.

They put as much of their illiquid net worth as possible into buying a condo, and the rest of their liquid net worth goes into paper dollars with no interest. So, for starters, they have to sacrifice liquidity for savings.

Egypt is not a very tech-savvy market; bitcoin, stablecoins, and other similar tech are all on the fringes. Many Muslims believe that bitcoin is speculation and thus bad, and so I appreciate the work that Saifedean and others do to show that no, bitcoin is interest-free sound money and good. If anything it's fiat money that doesn't conform to Muslim ideals. But more importantly, most Egyptians haven't actually spent time to understand the tech, unlike Nigeria or other countries. It's just not a "thing" there yet.

The only time I encountered someone in person who had not yet heard of bitcoin, was in Egypt. I was speaking to a friend, and we were talking about the Iranian protests; she was happy that many women had taken off their head coverings if they wanted to (she herself was someone who did so in Egypt, where it's permissible). I was like, "yeah, but it's rough for them. They risk getting bank accounts shut off. That's why some of them have promoted bitcoin. but I think it's still way too small yet."

And she was like, "what's bitcoin?"

And I was surprised. Many people haven't understood bitcoin, but most have heard the name. She hadn't heard the name even in 2022.

What we have today is clearly a local maximum. This is clearly not the height of monetary technology.