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When people think of the Caribbean they normally think of either a tourist destination or typically Jamaica. We however have a rich history filled with a number of struggles due to Colonialism. There is so much more to the Caribbean even though it is haunted by it's Colonial past, we see so many mixing of different cultures to form new cultures where people from places such as Africa, India, China and the locals that were there from the beginning have created a new culture. In it they developed new ways of speaking, different types of food and created new types of instruments. We however are still haunted by our past and this is still present in the modern day where we still believe that people of lighter complexion are of a higher standing. We ourselves in the Caribbean are still spread out between different islands and form a divide between each other, this has slowly begun to erode but we still try to act independently of each other and this has led us to form single stories of other islands such as Barbados only being  a tourist destination and Trinidad being a very crime ridden place. These islands however have other stories such as Barbados investing in tech companies such as Bitt as seen in the artifact and looking into things such as block-chain technology and Trinidad looking into tourism to diversify its economgy. This shows us that a place cannot be defined by one single aspect of it but is actually a combination of a number of different aspects that help to make it.

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Bitt has launched a blockchain-based version of the Barbadian dollar, a new product that it believes will help its service appeal to underbanked users in its home country.

The announcement follows two days of local engagement, including a private launch on Monday held at local restaurant Buzo Osteria Italiana, and an international launch during a cruise on Tuesday that took place in conjunction with the Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2016 conference in Barbados.

So far, the engagements have earned Bitt coverage from the Caribbean Broadcast Corporation ( CBC), as it seeks to better highlight its goal of creating a financial settlement network for the 15 nations in the CARICOM region.

Bitt CEO Gabriel Abed said that the formal unveiling moves the startup toward "phase three" of its launch plan, telling CoinDesk:

"Our goal as an organization is to build an ecosystem. We launched our exchange nine months ago. Now, we've launched our second phase, the digital fiat dollar. Whatever you want to call it, it's the dollar in Barbados digitized as an IOU that can be sent and received."

Abed said Bitt now intends to focus on developing a teller and ATM network to allow users to exchange digital dollars and bitcoin for hard currency, and for the startup to compete against remittance giants such as MoneyGram and Western Union.

Bitt will now seek to equip its mobile app to allow users to perform know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks as necessary to help it build a network for currency exchange, he explained.

Abed went on to suggest that there is widespread support for the idea among potential users in Barbados, including small business owners at gas stations and barber shops who want to add new services for customers.

"We have all these people who want to sign up because the solution has never existed before [in Barbados]. We don't have e-commerce on this island, but we have 100% penetration of mobile," he said.

Launching in 2015, Bitt has so far raised $1.5m and built a team of 16 employees.

Technical development

To create its digital dollar, Bitt takes advantage of the Colored Coins protocol, which allows for the creation of new assets on top of the bitcoin blockchain.

"This new layer can be used to assign a specific type of asset to a small fraction of a bitcoin," the company explains in an informational brochure.

Bitt's version of the Barbadian dollar is therefore able to act as a digital asset, with its value honored 1:1 with the country's government-backed currency.

Abed went on to state that transactions on this network can be observed by the government and local regulators as they are sent peer-to-peer to Bitt wallets.

In the future, Abed said, Bitt aims to upgrade its functionality via new technologies such as Liquid, Blockstream's project that enables bitcoin funds to move between exchanges, and BitGo Instant, a tool that enables zero-confirmation transactions.

The startup says these offerings will help it appeal to users who may be turned off by bitcoin's sometimes unpredictable market volatility and slow confirmation speeds.

Call for unity

In interview, Abed also issued a call to action that speaks to what he considers the vital need for next-generation money services options in Barbados and around the caribbean.

Most notably, he blasted the in-fighting among developers that he sees as a barrier to bitcoin-enabled financial services that provide real assistance to those in need.

"I need the bitcoin community," Abed said. "[Screw] Bitcoin Classic. [Screw] Bitcoin Core. This is our last fighting chance to have a global system before the government [restricts access to] bitcoin. [We need to] look at the ecosystem and realize this is possible."

He further warned that the perceived limitations of the bitcoin blockchain are putting his business at risk as it seeks to help lower the costs of remittances for real-world users.

"It's time to push," he said. "Yesterday was more of a formality. Bitt is here, we're in your face and it's a free-to-use financial solution."

Abed's comments, while impassioned, sought to portray the larger goal of financial inclusion as an issue that has been lost in the prolonged conversation surrounding how the bitcoin blockchain can scale to accommodate new users.

He concluded:

"Bitcoin's cool, blockchain is great, but we're applying the tech in an ecosystem where that's never been done before."

Barbadian dollar image via Shutterstock
The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Have breaking news or a story tip to send to our journalists? Contact us at news@coindesk.com.

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Bitt Launches Barbados Dollar on Blockchain, Calls for Bitcoin Unity - CoinDesk

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Bitt has launched a blockchain-based version of the Barbadian dollar, a new product that it believes will help its service appeal to underbanked users in its home country.

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Brain drain is a major problem in the Caribbean society. This is due to the fact that a number of people tend to try to work abroad or study abroad and then decide to live there. It hurts the Caribbean because a portion of the highly educated are leaving their respective islands and not helping their homes develop. This may be due to many different reasons but one of them can be said that some people may believe that other countries offer a better education and in some aspects this maybe true however this is not true for all especially in a technological era where information is available at the click of a button however this also requires person to actually go out and research this information. Even in these highly developed countries they still had a foundation that they built on and from their they kept building from there, however some people may perceive other places as being better without having a proper reason for why they believe this to be so. This may stem from the fact that during the colonial era that it was a common thought that the Caribbean itself was just a servant to another country and we were punished for taking pride in ourselves. Another issue as seen in the artifact is that some people also use the funding provided by GATE to acquire and education and then travel to countries outside the Caribbean to work. This hurts the different islands in the Caribbean because the government tries to promote people to acquire and education that will help the country grow. But instead people use it to bolster themselves and leave their home countries.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20160717/news/teelucksingh-gate-cutbacks-to-stem-brain-drain

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As CARICOM is a combination of countries in the Caribbean it's aim is to promote integration and cooperation between the different islands. However due to the different islands being it's own republic's there is still a long way to go in terms of becoming a completely joint body. This can be seen in the artifact given below when Jamaican nationals were rejected entry into Trinidad, as seen in the article it pointed to the fact that with CARICOM one of it's goal is the free movement of people as seen in the next artifact however this was not observed and Jamaica advised that it's citizens complain to the CARICOM community. However Trinidad did give justification as to why it denied these people however the point of the matter is that in order for CARICOM to archive it's goal member states have to be able to allow it's fellow member's entry into the country, if there is a sense of hesitance in this regard then it makes it harder to form a sense of regionalism because it is known that islands are hesitant to accept its fellow members. If we are able to archive a sense of regionalism then it would make it easier for residents of the Caribbean to form a Caribbean identity as opposed to forming an identity related to their home country.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/UPDATE--Trinidad-outlines-reasons-for-de
http://caricom.org/movement-of-people/

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After finishing this course I believe I have learned quite a lot from it and have become more knowledgeable about the place I was born in. Due to things such as revisionism I have begun to question things I have learned in school for example when I learned about the first people to have lived in the Caribbean and we were taught that they were called "Caribs" and "Arwaks". It was only in this course that I begun to understand that they were actually called the Tainos and Kalinagos and that the descriptions that we were given by them by the Colonial masters were quite skewed in the way that they described them. Throughout this course also some ideas that I have had have also been reinforced for example during the course when we spoke about stereotypes and how men are expected to be strong and unemotional and women are expected to be emotional and docile. These are however attributes put on by people of past generations and sometimes were quite forceful of their way of thinking, in some regards it did not allow people to be more expressive of themselves and become who they always wanted to be for example with women become engineers, they were not normally allowed to pursue this career because it was not accepted at the time. In the artifact included we see how it is typical for males to study more technical subjects and for females to study subjects like the humanities or food and nutrition. However overtime more women have attempted to go into fields such as engineering and information technology overtime. There is still a glass ceiling with respect to how much they are paid but overtime this is being broken.
http://uwispace.sta.uwi.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2139/6339/Jeanette%20Morris3.pdf?sequence=1
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20161112/editorial/the-glass-ceiling

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Coindesk. Bitt Launches Barbados Dollar on Blockchain, Calls for Bitcoin Unity. 24 February 2017. 20 November 2017. <https://www.coindesk.com/bitt-launches-barbados-dollar-on-the-blockchain-calls-for-bitcoin-unity/>

Trinidad Express Newspapers. Teelucksingh: GATE cutbacks to stem brain drain*

. 17 July 2011. 21 November 2017 <http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20160717/news/teelucksingh-gate-cutbacks-to-stem-brain-drain>.

Jamaica Observer. Teelucksingh: UPDATE: Trinidad outlines reasons for denying Jamaicans entry to country. 02 April 2016. 22 November 2017 <http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/UPDATE--Trinidad-outlines-reasons-for-denying-Jamaicans-entry-into-country>.

CARICOM. Movement of People. Accessed 22 Novemeber 2017. <http://caricom.org/movement-of-people/>

Jeanette Morris. "Gender Stereotyping" Accessed 22 November 2017.<http://uwispace.sta.uwi.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2139/6339/Jeanette%20Morris3.pdf?sequence=1>.

Trinidad Express Newspapers. The glass ceiling

. 12 November 2016. 22 November 2017 <http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20161112/editorial/the-glass-ceiling>.

Images  Used:
Bulace Magazine. Destination Highlight: Trinidad Tobago 02 August 2016. Accessed 19 November 2017.
http://www.bulacemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Trinidad-and-beach.jpg