The Adopting Bitcoin Pod

Today we’re speaking about Bitcoin adoption in Ghana. We have Kumi from Bitcoin Cowries, and Mawufemor of Bitcoin Dua, who have been sharing non-stop progress from their community building efforts, including a mobile bitcoin street store, soccer games, education center and more. Their latest video featured a gentleman buying a live chicken with bitcoin, which is currently going viral across bitcoin twitter. 

In this episode, we chat with Rich and Vali from Motiv Peru who have been educating communities about health and life skills to create a foundation for Motiv to introduce programs that will support a Bitcoin self-sustaining circular economy.

(00:00:00) Intro and advertisement

(00:02:46) Introduction Motiv

(00:09:00) How are the communities founded?

(00:23:13) How to find a leader?

(00:31:16) What are the indicators for success

(00:47:14) What can tourists expect?

(00:55:20) How about the stability of Peru?

(00:59:47) Open mic season

(01:05:48) Final words and outro

⁠Adopting Bitcoin⁠⁠ - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

⁠⁠Blink⁠⁠ - the everday bitcoin wallet

⁠⁠Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town⁠⁠ - Jan 26-28 2024

Adopting Bitcoin⁠ - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

⁠Blink⁠ - the everday bitcoin wallet

⁠Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town⁠ - Jan 26-28 2024

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:00:43) Welcome words

(00:02:29) Sponsoring

(00:04:33) Introduction Bitcoin Berlin

(00:15:05) Why Bitcoin?

(00:18:28) How Bitcoin Berlin started?

(00:25:13) Merchants in Berlin

(00:37:57) Build a sustainable community

(00:43:01) Bringing Bitcoin to the people

(00:50:59) How important is education?

(00:57:47) Salvas Story

(00:59:50) Open mic season

(01:04:44) Last words and outro

This week we have Bitcoiners from Argentina on the pod - Argentina has been wrestling with chronic inflation of their local currency the Argentinian Peso for decades and recently made headlines when a libertarian outsider called Javier Milei who is also said to be bitcoin-friendly won the Presidential primaries by surprise. Part of Milei’s platform was a very hostile stance against central banks and not surprisingly this has made Bitcoiners pay attention and get excited about this candidate. In this episode we learn from Argentinian Bitcoiners Ariel and Adam how much is true of these rumours - is maybe a second bitcoin president in the making? And what else is going on around Bitcoin in Argentina.

Bitcoin Ekasi is a circular economy project based in Mossel Bay, built after the model of Bitcoin Beach. Together with a Machankura, a project aiming to give people without an internet-connected device a way to send and receive Bitcoin payments, they will be hosting the Adopting Bitcoin conference in Cape Town in January 2024. The Bitcoin conference will convene experts, advocates and innovators from around the world to dive into the topics of Bitcoin, self-sovereignty and parallel institutions. We chat with Hermann and Kgothatso about bitcoin in Africa, the various initiatives to further its adoption and the upcoming conference.

Adopting Bitcoin⁠ - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

⁠Blink⁠ - the everday bitcoin wallet

⁠Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town⁠ - Jan 26-28 2024

We talk with Bitcoiners Eliazar, Rudy and Reyna working on the Bitcoin Lake project at Lake Panachajel in Guatelama and the progress they are making with Mi Primer Bitcoin classes to educate about Bitcoin.

Adopting Bitcoin⁠ - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

⁠Blink⁠ - the everday bitcoin wallet

⁠Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town⁠ - Jan 26-28 2024

Did you know that the town of Rovereto⁠ in the autonomous Province of Trento got bitcoinized back in 2014, with plenty of merchants accepting bitcoin payments? We got a hold of Marco Amadori whose presentation about Open Source Software in which he mentioned Bitcoin as an example sparked the interest of the locals and marked the starting point of a whole town's bitcoin adventure that has been going on for almost a decade.

Adopting Bitcoin⁠ - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

⁠Blink⁠ - the everday bitcoin wallet

⁠Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town⁠ - Jan 26-28 2024

Close to Merida, the capital of Yucatan, there are seven so-called Pueblos Magicos – Sisal, Mani, Valladolid and Izamal and recently also Motul, Espita and Tecax. These are located on the tourist route through the state and receive a lot of support from the Mexican government to promote themselves. Here Daniel wants to work on Bitcoin adoption, as a starting point for 'his' country Mexico, just like it all started in El Salvador with Bitcoin Beach. We chat with Mercedes, Amanda and Daniel, the folks behind the Bitcoin Yucatan project about their plans to build a bitcoin economy around these places, using the principles of the Bitcoin Beach whitepaper and adapted for the local culture.

Sponsors:

⁠Adopting Bitcoin⁠ - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

⁠Blink⁠ - the everday bitcoin wallet

⁠Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town⁠ - Jan 26-28 2024

We chat with Okin from Easysats in Namibia - their mission is to find ways that allow anyone to easily purchase Bitcoin, while using their accumulated expertise & technical knowledge to ensure that not only can Namibians purchase Bitcoin, but they are made aware of how they can accept it for their goods & services as well as securely store it themselves, without the need for continued interaction with others.

Okin shares his recipe for getting merchants onboard to accept bitcoin payments - a crucial challenge in the bootstrapping of circular economies - and we talk Bitcoin in Namibia and Africa in general.

Sponsors:

Adopting Bitcoin - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

Blink - the everday bitcoin wallet

Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town - Jan 26-28 2024

In this episode, we talk to bitcoin community builders in Brazil. Fernando Motolese, the initiator of Praia Bitcoin in Jericocoara, started onboarding merchants in his beautiful beach village in September 2021 after he saw the impact a circular economy could have when El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender. Not only did his efforts spawn bitcoin adoption in his village, but also helped other Bitcoiners like Jeff and Vinicius find him and even inspired similar projects in other parts of Brazil, like Montanha Bitcoin in São Thomé das Letras initiated by Lucas Leiva. This discussion illustrates the power of initiative and the accelerating effect of joining forces with other Bitcoiners determined to bring sound money to Brazil.

Sponsors:

Adopting Bitcoin - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

Blink - the everday bitcoin wallet

Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town - Jan 26-28 2024

In this episode, we talk to Dušan Matuška and Zussel Ramos of Amityage, the very first Bitcoin Education Center in Honduras, on a beautiful island of Roatan, located inside of Próspera jurisdiction. Próspera is a private charter city and special economic zone on the island of Roatan in Honduras. A governance platform and a place where you can do business freely and easily. A place where you can pay in Bitcoin with no capital gains on your bitcoin transactions. This former pirate hideout seems to be the perfect spot for Amityage's mission to accelerate bitcoinization and to make Roatan the Bitcoin island of Caribbean.

Sponsors:

Adopting Bitcoin - A Lightning Summit in El Salvador, Nov 7-9 2023

Blink - the everday bitcoin wallet

Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town - Jan 26-28 2024

In Season 3 of ABP, hosts Andrew and Kemal are exploring bitcoin adoption in different parts of the world. For episode 1, they are joined by Ethan Rose of Pouch and Bitcoin Islands to talk about bitcoin usage and adoption on the beautiful island of Boracay in the Philippines.

Website: adoptingbitcoin.org

Tickets: pretix.eu

Twitter: @AdoptingBTC

Instagram: AdoptingBTC

Youtube: @adoptingbitcoin

Telegram: AdoptingBTC

Laws can help in the adoption of Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Law in El Salvador certainly brought a lot of attention to the peer to peer electronic cash system and removed obstacles for its use as a Medium of Exchange. Without a financially literate population that is proficient in the fundamentals of using Bitcoin, however, real adoption can hardly happen. It requires education, not just decree. Mi Primer Bitcoin is a grassroots Bitcoin education initiative in El Salvador that is bringing Bitcoin education to schools and villages. And recently, they have graduated the first cohort of students from their novel Bitcoin curriculum. We are joined by Gloriana and Raul, two Bitcoin educators, who have been working with Mi Primer Bitcoin since its inception, and talk about achievements and what their plans for the future are.

In this episode, Andrew sits down with Pete Winn to talk about Community Banking on Bitcoin, from microlending to bring foreign investment to entrepreneurs facilitated by a community bank to mitigate credit risk, to synthetic dollar offerings to mitigate exchange rate volatility and Fedimint: a privacy enhancing Chaumian mint that works on Lightning.

The btc++ hackathon brought together Bitcoin and Lightning developers together in Austin for 3 days of hacking in Austin, TX. PlebLab co-founder Kyle Murphy, Hoseki founder and hackathon juror Sam Abbassi and Galoy engineer Nick Theile talk about Austin's vibrant Bitcoin scene, cool projects at the hackathon and many other things. 

A Bitcoin-friendly regulation passed three debates in the congress of Panama unanimously before it was surprisingly vetoed by President Laurentino Cortizo. Where does Bitcoin in Panama go from here? And how does the country's history play into this? We'll talk about this and more with Abelito and Miguel Heilbron who have been following the developments closely.

A delegation of Bitcoiners followed the invitation of President Faustin Touadéra to visit Central African Republic after the country's announcement of Bitcoin adoption. The group around Sebastién Gouspillou and Nicolas Burtey met with merchants, government officials and representatives of civil society to learn about the plans and progress of the Bitcoin journey.  In the livestream episode #23 of Adopting Bitcoin - A Conversation with Galoy, Andrew is joined by Nicolas Burtey, Sebastien Gouspillou, Dr. Yamb Ntimba, Jean Christophe Busnel, David Oren and Noor El Bawab who traveled to Bangui to meet with the president.

Video of the talk

Season 2 kick-off and live talk with the advisor team of Adopting Bitcoin 2022 about this year's event. Adopting Bitcoin will take place November 15-17 in San Salvador. Moritz Wietersheim from Specter, Giacomo Zucco, Jeff Gallas from Fulmo, Rodrigo Gomez from Bitrefill, Vlad Costea from BTCTKVR, Alexandre Bussutil from bolt.observer talk about the developments in El Salvador and their expectations for Adopting Bitcoin's second installment. We're also joined by Chimbera of Bitcoin Beach and Nicolas Burtey who spend the week orange-pilling 44 Central Bank representatives who followed the invitation of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion to come to El Salvador for the annual meeting. 

More info and tickets for the conference: https://adoptingbitcoin.org

Watch the video of this episode on Youtube.

There’s this wealth of knowledge about Bitcoin out there in the form of podcasts, articles, Youtube videos etc and it’s high quality, but it’s only accessible to people who speak English. There are efforts to localize and translate content into local languages, but it’s a lot of work and where should one really be starting? Luckily, we found just the right guys who have already done this with a lot of success: the infamous group of Einundzwanzig around Markus, Dennis and Gigi who have been summoning thousands of German speaking plebs from Switzerland, Austria and Germany under their banner and sending out a really strong signal since 2019. Inspired by the success of Einundzwanzig, forks in other languages emerged like Dvadesedjedan and Yirmibir. To make it even easier to copy the concept, Gigi revealed twentyone.world during the show. We couldn't have asked for a better ending to our first season of 21 episodes! See you in the next season when we proceed to Hyperbitcoinization.

We speak with Rich Swisher of MOTIV about their first steps building a Bitcoin Economy in Peru inspired by the success of Bitcoin Beach El Zonte. The project started when Rich and his partner discovered that the lack of proper footwear in a community was the cause of excess child mortality. After a successful intervention with very low cost, they decided to take it a step further and introduce Bitcoin to the marginalized communities. Again, with success.

Links:

MOTIV Website

Bitcoin Magazine Article

In this episode Andrew and Kemal are joined by Coindesk writer George Kaloudis to recap the Open Source Stage. Many visitors to the biggest Bitcoin conference to date said that this was where the signal was to be found. For George, Bitcoin 2022 was his first Bitcoin conference. He was immediately drawn to the Open Source Stage and wrote about his impressions from diving into it. 

It all started in 2013 with three friends having beers and musing how cool it would be if they could pay for their drinks with Bitcoin, and that was the moment Bitcoin City Arnhem was born. In this episode we talk with Patrick van der Meijde, one of the initiators about the beginnings, the challenges and success of turning a town in Netherlands into a Bitcoiner's paradise, with international grocery stores and world-renown Burger houses all jumping on and accepting Bitcoin payments way before Tadge Dryja and Joseph Poon described the Lightning Network. 

Check out this nice clip about the Bitcoin City, too, and the payment processor Bitkassa, that the 3 friends built.

In episode 17 we're joined by Brian Harrington, a Southern California Bitcoiner who has been orange-pilling individuals and merchants in the area for years. Brian is one of the initiators of the Orange County Bitcoin Network and a big proponent of real world meetups with Bitcoiners. He also advocates for more education around personal finance and for getting off fiat completely with the #GetOnZero campaign. 

Lebanon was once dubbed the Switzerland of the Middle East for its unique status as both a snow-capped destination and discreet banking hub for Gulf Arabs. But the average inflation rate by September 2021 reached 132.98%, higher than the average inflation rate of 66.13% over the first nine months in 2020. In this episode, Sooly and Marco from Bitcoin du Liban tell us about the events that led up to the Lebanese Lira's collapse, like a tax on WhatsApp and devastating wild fires, why luxury good prices remained almost unaffected, and how energy and electricity supply played a critical role. 

Fodè Diop, prolific Bitcoin application developer, decided to raise thousands of new Bitcoin application developers and is launching the Bitcoin Developers Academy on April 11, 2022 to do just that. The goal of the academy is to train the next generation of Bitcoin application developers at a reasonable cost. Anyone with an open mind and a laptop can enroll. Learners will have the support of more experienced coaches to help them through their journey of learning Bitcoin application development with the Rust programming language.

In this week's episode we have two very special guests who participated at the Lightning Hackdays this past weekend. The Lightning Hackdays are an unconference focused on the Lightning Network organized by Fulmo from Berlin and this time they took place at the Cobac Co-Working space in Istanbul right next to the Golden Horn. There were around 150 participants from many different countries and great projects that led sessions. Participants couldn't really join all the sessions because there were quite a few running in parallel, so it's great to hear the experiences of Calle and Freerk.

Some projects discussed:

GTP-LN 

Raspiblitz

Bolt 12

Pubinno Lightning Beertap

Keynotes:

Carla-Kirk Cohen (Lightning Labs) - State of the Lightning Network

Nicolas Burtey (Galoy) - USD Over Lightning

Rene Pickhardt - Optimally reliable and cheap payment flows on the Lightning Network

You can watch the recorded Livestream of Friday's keynotes on Youtube

Bilal Göregen performance 

Find tweets releated to the Hackdays with #LightningHackdayIST

If you are interested in playing around with the Galoy API and USD over Lightning, you're welcome to join the Galoy Slack #hackathon !

We are joined by Rikki from Bitcoin Italia podcast who shared his experiences living on Bitcoin only for over a month in El Salvador.

In this week's space Johns Beharry from Peakshift and Bitcoin Design joined us to talk about the different address and invoice types that wallets use to communicate with each other. We dive into the challenges resulting from different standards, possible solutions to mitigate in the now, as well as what we can expect to develop on the protocol and application level going forward.

It's one of those weeks when decades happened in Bitcoin, so Andrew and Kemal run through the news of this eventful week and discuss CashApp rolling out Lightning to 100% of their 36M users, the crazy weird couple that was caught with the hacked Bitfinex funds, Aarika Rhodes running against Brad Sherman, Bitcoiners thinking about Universal Basic Income and Russia's Bitcoin pivot. 

In our 10th space we had the privilege of hosting Lord Fusitu’a, who is working to bring Bitcoin to the island nation of Tonga. He is also deeply involved in recovery efforts following the massive volcanic eruption that recently displaced people from their homes and wiped out all communications to the island.

This episode is a bit of a journey. Lord had to join us late due to a last minute conflict, so we invited up two people involved in Tonga’s recovery and Lightning liquidity building initiatives to share some of their experience and thoughts.

First, we heard from Derek Ross who has been a core member of #LiquidityForTonga; a telegram group of node operators formed to build rings of fire for increasing liquidity to Tonga’s nodes.

Second, we hear from Josh – who goes by @satoshiops on twitter – who has launched an ambitious mission aimed at helping restore communications to Tonga’s islands using airdropped radio equipment.

At around minute 43, Lord joined us for what turned out to be a moving and inspiring 90 minute conversation.

In this episode we are joined by Jeff and Rootzoll who have been active contributors to the Bitcoin ecosystem for over a decade since 2011. They have been early adopters and proponents of the Lightning Network for 5 years since 2016. Their Berlin based company Fulmo, which means Lightning in Esperanto, is focussed on research, development and consultancy for the Bitcoin Lightning Network, and they are the organizers of the Lightning Hackdays, which is a technology and building focussed unconference, and also the first ever Lightning Conference that took place in 2019 in Berlin. Rootzoll is the lead maintainer of the free and open source Lightning Node Package Raspiblitz, which makes it fairly simple even for non-technical users to run a sovereign bitcoin and lightning node from home on affordable hardware. They are currently preparing the next iteration of the Lightning Hackdays which will take place in a little under a month in the metropole of Istanbul / Turkey.

In this 8th episode we’re excited to have John Carvalho from Synonym with us alongside Galoy engineer Justin Carter. Synonym had its coming out of stealth at the Adopting Bitcoin Lightning Summit in El Salvador past November in a talk John gave at the conference. Before that, the company was operating in stealth mode for over a year and kept many in the space following in suspense what new project John would tackle after his tenure at Bitrefill was over. Now that the cat is out of the bag and it’s been 2 months since the announcement, we are excited to learn a bit more about Synonym and how their products and tools can help Architect a Self-Sovereign Economy.

We speak with Gustavo Flores and Tristan Borges of Bitcoin Support by Bull Bitcoin. Bull Bitcoin is a Canadian Bitcoin only exchange serving Canadian users since 2015 and they recently launched Bitcoin Support  -  a service that helps people install, secure, and manage bitcoin wallets with one-on-one phone support. Unlike the centralized financial services that you may be used to, there was no Bitcoin hotline that you could call to get support when you need it - until now. 

Gustavo and Tristan talk about the importance of being a sovereign Bitcoiner, recommend tools and wallets to use, and introduce the set of services they offer at Bitcoin Support to help Bitcoiners become sovereign in one-on-one phone calls. 

We speak with Lee Salminen, Rich Scotford and Prem Govinda of Bitcoin Jungle, a company and community in Costa Rica who made leaps in bootstrapping a Bitcoin Circular Economy in the land of 'Pura Vida'. Bitcoin Jungle is one of many rising Bitcoin communities in Central America after the example of Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador, but the first of these to implement the Free and Open Source Galoy platform to launch their own Bitcoin bank with a Lightning wallet. Lee and the team give an overview of the project, share their experiences in implementing the Galoy technology stack, collaboration with the Galoy team as well as their vision and plans moving forward. They are joined by Galoy CEO Nicolas Burtey and Galoy engineer Arvin.

We speak with Hermann of Bitcoin Ekasi (@bitcoinekasi) and Luthando, a Senior coach with The Surfer Kids (@the_surfer_kids) about their first steps building a Bitcoin Economy in a South African township inspired by the success of Bitcoin Beach El Zonte. @BitcoinEkasi is teaching residents and merchants in the townships outside Mossel Bay how – and why – to use Bitcoin as money. The project is managed by @the_surfer_kids, a local non-profit empowering marginalized youths.

Donate to the Surfer Kids: https://www.thesurferkids.com/donate

In this episode we were joined by Oleg Mikhalsky, partner at Fulgur ventures and Alexandre Bussutil, a researcher with Fulgur ventures. The two are producing a research series called “Roads to Hyperbitcoinization” that outlines the views and predictions made by the bitcoin community concerning the prospect of Hyperbitcoinization. 

Bitcoin Lake Article

@LakeBitcoin on Twitter

Bitcoin Banking for Communities Article

Stephen DeLorme is a UX designer and Spiral (previously Square Crypto) grantee working on crafting UX best practices for Lightning network applications. During his trip to El Salvador for Adopting Bitcoin, Stephen documented his attempts to use bitcoin as money. In this space we dig into what worked, what didn’t, and where the biggest opportunities for improvement exist.