In 2013, I paid my employees in cash. I was running a software company in Herat, Afghanistan, and most of my employees were women. Payday always made me nervous. Carrying that much cash through the streets was dangerous for me. But handing it over was dangerous for them. Often, their wages did not stay in their hands. A father took it, or a husband or brother.
The problem only worsened when my company partnered with a New York-based digital media firm. Together, we created a platform on which Afghan women could write articles, upload videos and earn money from their work. It began in Afghanistan and soon grew beyond the country. Hundreds of women contributed. Suddenly, we were trying to pay not only our employees in Herat but also a growing and dispersed network of women.
I tried every alternative. Banks were not the answer: Women could legally open accounts, but for cultural reasons, it rarely happened. Almost none of the women and girls who worked with us had a bank account. Popular payment apps that Americans use to transfer money digitally did not operate inside Afghanistan.
A Different Kind of Money
Then, my partner sent me an article about something called bitcoin. I was skeptical. But as I read, I recognized something familiar. Afghans have relied on hawala for centuries, using networks of trusted brokers to move value across long distances without the formal banking system. Hawala works where banks do not, but it still depends on the broker and their settlement network. Bitcoin reminded me of hawala, but with an important difference: Transactions could be verified by mathematics and a global network running open-source software rather than a single intermediary.
We taught the girls how to set up their own digital wallets and began paying them in bitcoin. I worried they would not trust something they could not touch, but they understood it faster than the bankers because they understood the problem it solved. For some of the women, it was the first time they could receive their earnings directly, save privately and decide for themselves how to use money.
Using experimental money to run my business wasn’t easy. When bitcoin’s price fell sharply after its 2013 peak, our competitors accused us of defrauding the young women who worked with us. We covered the difference for some of our employees and contributors based on the earlier value, at enormous cost to the company. Volatility was an obstacle then, and it remains one today.
The amount might have been small, but the independence it gave them was not.
But using bitcoin changed how I understood money. A bank balance is a debt your bank owes you. A wire transfer passes through a chain of institutions, each operating under its own laws. The system works as long as those institutions continue to honor their promises. But when banks close, governments change or payment companies stop operating, access to your own money can disappear overnight.
Bitcoin works differently. If you control your own keys, you do not need a bank to approve a transaction. You can transfer value directly to someone else. Sending money from Herat to Hamburg does not require banks in Afghanistan and Germany to maintain a legal relationship with each other.
One of my colleagues showed me what that could mean. When threats forced her to flee Afghanistan in 2016, she lost nearly everything along the route through Iran and Turkey. But she retained access to her bitcoin through her wallet’s 12-word recovery phrase. When she reached Germany, she was able to use those savings to begin rebuilding her life.
When Banks Fail
When Afghanistan’s capital city, Kabul, fell in August 2021, we learned this lesson again. Banks restricted withdrawals, cash became scarce, international payments were severely disrupted and the country’s central bank lost access to reserves held abroad. Families who had worked for years to save money suddenly struggled to access it. My own parents were among them. Bitcoin remained one of the few ways some Afghans could retain control of their savings and move value across borders. People began asking me how to use it.
Bitcoin is not my passion. My passion is educating girls and defending the rights of women in Afghanistan and beyond. Through the Digital Citizen Fund, we teach Afghan girls in underground classrooms and through our online learning platform, the Afghan Dreamers Academy. We teach math and science, robotics and engineering, digital literacy and entrepreneurship. We also created Digital Citizen Labs, physical learning centers where young people can access computers, learn practical technology skills and receive hands-on robotics training. We are now expanding these centers to Pakistan, Turkey and South Africa.
I have also developed a digital comic book called The Chain Remembers, which uses storytelling to teach young people about bitcoin and human rights. I want them to understand not only how technology works but also why control over their own money can make such a difference in their lives.
After seeing what financial independence means for a woman’s life, I cannot think of bitcoin as only a speculative asset. It is not a perfect solution, and its volatility remains a serious concern. But for the women I worked with, it meant something more basic and important: the ability to keep what they had earned.