Guatemalan Town Cleans Local Lake Using Bitcoin Miners

A Guatemalan circular Bitcoin economy known as “Bitcoin Lake” is leveraging Bitcoin ASICs to clean nearby Lake Atitlán while generating income for the community.

As Bitcoin Lake founder Patrick Melder explained, the “Kaboom” mining project reuses used cooking oil to help mine Bitcoin, instead of polluting the local environment.

Does mining help the environment?

As Melder told Bitcoin Magazine, the project is a follow-up to previous attempts to clean the lake that were ultimately both costly and unsuccessful.

“Over the past five years, a major effort to clean up the lake costing over $300 million has failed because it was so complex with so many major stakeholders that could not agree on a solution,” he added.

In contrast, Bitcoin Lake took a bottom-up approach to ecological sustainability. It involves reusing used cooking oil to mine Bitcoin, which would otherwise have been thrown on the street or the landfill that stood over Lake Atitlán.

“Either way, it would find its way into the watershed and into the lake,” Melder said. On the other hand. while the mining process produces carbon dioxide, it reduces pollution of the lake.

Bitcoin Lake shared a video of the project in action earlier this month. Under one tent, the founder kept several containers of used cooking oil, a generator, ASICs and a laptop that tracked the hash generated. Both the generator and the ASICs are old, recycled models, but have found a “second life” thanks to the “almost free energy” from seed oils.

The founder hopes to popularize the initiative in neighboring communities as they realize that they can clean the environment in a practical and profitable way.

In the United States, concerns about Bitcoin Mining’s negative impact on the environment remain common among regulators. However, several reports has outlined ways it can help heal the environment, such as wood flaring excess natural gas.

Spread Bitcoin adoption

Melder’s broader “Bitcoin Lake” project — of which “Kaboom” is a part — has three goals: clean the lake, educate the community about Bitcoin, and create a circular Bitcoin economy. That includes spreading Bitcoin’s use as a store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account.

“The really good circular #Bitcoin economy is to use any kind of wasted energy to mine BTC and secure the network. In the process – redistributing revenue BACK TO SOCIETY,” tweeted Bitcoin Lake September 12.

The project was inspired by El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach, how different Bitcoin-friendly initiatives has taken hold. However, unlike the Salvadoran example, Bitcoin Lake had no large endowments or donations to kick-start its operations. However, mining helps bring Bitcoin into the economy.

In terms of education, the project already has Bitcoin-related material into the local education center. Since January, children in the area have been learning core concepts like “what is inflation” and even “what is money” — ideas that some say traders on Wall Street struggling to grasp.

Educational meetings for adults, businesses and leaders in indigenous communities are also present. Overall, the initiative is meant to inspire natural adoption through education, rather than coercion that catches businesses off guard.

In El Salvador, many protested to the Bitcoin Act upon its implementation last year, which included a provision to force businesses to accept Bitcoin. President Bukele clarified later that the details only applied to large companies in practice.

“Since we started in January of this year, we have brought over 60 businesses in and around Panajachel, and in Guatemala as a whole we have about 200 businesses that we have onboarded to accept bitcoin,” Melder explained.