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
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.”
I first encountered Harris late last year when he was launching a bid to teach the Lakota how to mine and trade Bitcoin. He managed to raise about four Bitcoin to support his campaign, but then lost the lot when his virtual wallet was hacked. Undeterred, he started work on MazaCoin, which has now been officially adopted as the national currency of the Lakota Nation. Since my article, he has spoken to journalists around the world about his plan to swap the dollar for digital denominations.
After signing a joint venture agreement with the Oglala Sioux Tribe Office of Economic Development early in 2014, Harris immediately began mining his new currency to produce 25 million MazaCoins ahead of its launch to serve as a “national reserve” for the Lakota Nation, which can then be used in times of crisis (like the collapse of Mt. Gox) to help stabilize the currency. A number of these coins were handed out to interested businesses and individuals within the community, to encourage them to get involved in trading and speculating .
On Monday of this week, the genesis block of this new currency was hashed, so that all future transactions can be traced back to it, and 500 MazaCoins were produced and dedicated to the “Great Spirit and the prosperity and wealth of the Oglala Lakota Nation”. Now it is being traded on cryptocurrency exchanges around the world. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
“I want to get my people educated and show them this is the next level of finance,” Harris continues. “Let’s make the rest of the world play catch up. Let’s be leaders and rebuild the economy on our terms. We’re not going to ask the federal government if we can do this. I refuse to ask them to do anything within my own borders. When you have children going hungry, it’s time to focus.”
Understandably, there’s a bit of confusion about what exactly this new currency is going to do for the impoverished Lakota people. When I contacted them, tribal elders declined to speak about MazaCoin, instead referring me back to Harris. However, there is certainly support for the scheme, as well as bewilderment. Other tribes from around America have already contacted Harris to wish him well and express an interest. The project has allegedly gathered enough steam to attract the attention of the FBI, which phoned the Lakota chief to warn him that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies aren’t actually legal yet.
Harris isn’t inclined to listen to these warnings. He’s launched an educational campaign to show the Lakota how to mine this new alt-coin, which works on similar principles to Bitcoin itself. Harris has gone to dozens of pow-wows to discuss his idea and wants to see his people set up their own cryptocurrency exchanges to trade MazaCoin for other digital currencies. In the long term - and depending on its success - he wants to see it introduced into the wider local economy, so that businesses sell goods or services using MazaCoin rather than the dollar. A handful of businesses have already agreed to start using the coin as well as hard cash.
“Just like debit cards, it will take a while for people to get it,” Harris adds. “But once people understood the new cards, they began to accept them. The same will happen with MazaCoin. We have other tribes looking into cryptocurrencies as well, like the Northern Cheyennes and some tribes in Colorado. Some tribes have casinos and are doing well. This will help the destitute tribes who don’t have that source of income.”
Mining MazaCoin is currently much more straightforward than mining Bitcoin, requiring significantly less processing power. This makes it one of the world’s more environmentally-friendly cryptocurrencies, as the mining calculations do not use as much power and can even be achieved using out-of-date machines which are no longer have enough grunt to mine Bitcoin, which becomes increasingly difficult to mine with every coin that is minted.
There’s a long way to go for MazaCoin, which is currently just one of many alt-coins battling to become valuable. Without the support of the world’s crypto-community, it will be just another worthless bundle of numbers. However, it already has the good will of investors, with a buzz building on social media and forums. It’s the sort of excitement that prefigured the success of other alt-coins like DogeCoin or LiteCoin, but this time driven by a commitment to the ethical and social goals of the project. In the wake of the collapse of Mt. Gox and as calls for a ban on Bitcoin become louder, the world of digital finance could do with a shot of optimism and a reminder that crypto currencies were always about upturning the established order, rather than replicating it. There are a great many battles left to be fought and, as Harris points out, this war is just getting started.
