Crypto in Iceland. An Untapped Market

very informal blog post warning

Iceland... a land with unbounded nature and beautiful women, amongst other attractions. The culture of the island is very community driven and welcoming. Tourism has become a major industry here and the people of Reykjavik have embraced their city becoming a tourism hub.

A major habit you will notice in Iceland is the great degree to which the nation has been transitioning to become a cashless society. The dream of many economies, the smooth and easy use of card payments and lack of cash make for a frictionless experience for those travelling, I, for example, didn't exchange any of my CAD for ISK and I have had no problem paying with my phones tap everywhere I go. So how does this open the door to crypto payments, well being that the people here are already used to tap and go payments, educating them on the utility of Bitcoin or other currency centric coins wouldn't be a difficult venture in my opinion? An attempt was already made to create a kind of national decentralized digital currency in Auroracoin here back in 2014, this failed to gain traction (at least for the time being)

So how could the people of Iceland be convinced to put their faith in code rather than banks? Well, we haven't really seen any kind of real mass adoption yet anywhere (these things take time) I think Iceland could be the perfect place to propagate and spread a digital currency revolution, to do this emphasis needs to be put on spreading an easy UI for people to interact with in terms of storing their funds, there are various bitcoin mobile wallets that are clean and easy to use, BRD or Bitcoin.com (If you are a BCH fan) to name a couple, by making using these digital currencies simple the average person could easily be convinced to try out a few transactions. Next would come merchant adoption, this is the tricker part as most people are simply unwilling to risk relying on the volatile nature of digital currencies to store their value, services like Bitpay help to alleviate these risks as you can convert your BTC or BCH to whatever currency you choose right away and with the development of stablecoins on the rise, all it would take is for the integration of DAI or TUSD to completely take away the need for fiat. The people of Iceland are quite progressive and open to new ideas and convincing them of trusting in code wouldn't be as monumental of a task as many would think (the country's economy almost collapsed less than a decade ago because of blind trust in banks)

With a population of less than 400'000 convincing the tight-knit, progressive Icelanders to adopt a digital currency may not be totally out of the question if the right people can get a movement going, all it would take is for a few major retailers in the capital to start offering and I'm sure the domino effect could spread. I'd like to expand on this more (perhaps in a future blog) but I have to go climb another mountain now, have good one guys and stay steeming :)