I came across an interesting claim two days ago by scoopnest.com quoting an analysis declaring Dubai as ranked 2 in the ‘Top 50 Crypto hub cities’.

The report is said to be from ‘recap’. I found the site at recap.io but can’t seem to see the original article there. This came from their twitter account:

Dubai itself is celebratory of the listing, with the tweet which goes:

There are many other articles around which reflect on  ‘Top cities in Crypto’ in a completely different way.

Some of the indices used to compile the listing are at best bizarre.

When I think of Crypto-currency specifically, I think of decentralized money. I think of individual freedom of movement, agility, mobility, anonymity, privacy, trustlessness, borderless.

I think of tools that enable the transactions of business and personal life flexibly from anywhere, any time and void of overview or observation.

So why does a city’s Quality of Life matter? Bitcoin or Ethereum are not living things. Why do physically located events matter?

It seems like the rating system has been designed for a world before internet appeared at all, far less for the world ‘post blockchain’

Nigeria has two cities featuring in the list – Lagos at 14 and Ibadan at 24.

Though my instinct tells me that if it was done on nations as a whole, and without some of these completely irrelevant index components, Nigeria would have done a lot better.

Nigeria has succeeded in posting highest volume day trades many times in spite of an in force cryptocurrency ban.

The next highest ranked city on the continent of Africa is Luanda in Angola at 38, completely bypassing the other four ‘African Powerhouse’ nations  which goes to further emphasise the strange impact of this peculiar rating methodology.

Lara Abdul Malak had this to say:

‘Personally I don’t see how crypto is related to quality of life. For me the most popular crypto enthusiasts and users are usually from cities and countries which have the most unbanked population or live in countries where the financial and economic situation is not that impressive….

…. Their second criterion was crypto specific events! Wow this was a first for me, so if a city carries out a lot of crypto events then automatically it becomes a city leading the way in cryptocurrency….

,,,, even CZ from Binance tweeted the other day that UAE has a crypto event every day! ‘

Unless they are speaking of ‘crypto’ outside a significance to blockchain and purely on the bases of security afforded by cryptography. But… I’m fairly sure when John Uwaya recently was talking about new security measures in Nigeria, he was proposing bullet proof vehicles and security personnel tactics, not AES, Twofish or RSA algorithms to thwart armed assailants.

The whole notion of blockchain technologies on the one had is built on decentralized frameworks, and the entire direction of this report includes metrics that reward everything centralized.

The concepts of ‘city’ and ‘hub’ along with their features of ‘Quality of Life’ and ‘In-person events’ are diametrically opposed to metrics that validate decentralization.

So for now, I guess we wait to see if we get  a report that has more understanding of the decentralized nature of Blockchain and its products.

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References all recovered 05-07 Feb 2023:

twitter.com/DXBMediaOffice/status/1621010027862724610

scoopnest.com/user/DXBMediaOffice/1621010027862724610-dubai-ranks-first-regionally-a-2nd-globally-on-recap39s-2022-39top-50-crypto-hub-cities39-list-the-r

bitcoinist.com/2022-crypto-recap-was-this-the-worst-year-since-cryptos-were-born/

laraontheblock.blogspot.com/2023/02/why-recap-report-that-puts-dubai-uae-as.html

toptenreviews.com/encryption-algorithms

twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1621174126907117569