From Forbes:
Standing on the banks of the Little Bighorn River last year, a son of the once-mighty Oglala Lakota Tribe made a promise to continue his ancestors’ fight against the United States. Only this time the war wouldn’t be fought with arrows or bullets, but with QR codes and cryptography.
“My family fought and died on this soil,” recalls Payu Harris, a Bitcoin developer and native activist. “Suddenly the story of Custer’s Last Stand wasn’t just words on a page but something deeply personal. I looked at how things were for the tribe now and suddenly had an idea about how we might fix it. We can’t continue to be 20 years behind the times, always trying to catch up. We have to be forward-thinking.”
Now, a year later, the opening skirmishes of this latest battle have begun in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one of the most impoverished areas in the US. His tribe has just become the first native people to launch their very own cryptocurrency, MazaCoin. Harris wants to see if it’s possible to sidestep the federal government and use the tribal nation’s limited sovereignty to set its own rules on cryptocurrencies. After all, greenbacks haven’t done much for the people of Pine Ridge. If they can ditch the dollar and make MazaCoin work, Harris thinks, they could set an example for the whole world.
“I think cryptocurrencies could be the new buffalo,” he says. “Once, it was everything for our survival. We used it for food, for clothes, for everything. It was our economy. I think MazaCoin could serve the same purpose.”...MORE
