An Optimistic View of the Bitcoin Community – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast”, hosted by P and Q. In this episode they are joined by Matt Odell to talk about Bitcoin, Bugs as Food, the importance of community, and of course the price of Bitcoin.
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Transcript
Matt Odell: So welcome to my studio.
Q: It’s lovely. Let’s talk about Bitcoin Park for a moment because this is an absurd thing. Is it like this is just Soho House for Bitcoiners.
Odell: It’s better than Soho House, right? Like, was that an offensive statement? No. Did you mean that critically?
Q: I meant that as a compliment. Thanks people. Like what you guys are trying to build here is truly remarkable. I mean this duplex situation.
Odell: We joke that it’s similar to Soho House and that you have membership and private rooms. You can work, you can meet, you can collaborate, we can podcast, you can party, you can podcast. We have podcast studios all over the place. I think the big difference between us and Soho House – the way I think about Bitcoin Park – is that Bitcoin Park is really a community.
It is primarily to support Bitcoin and grassroots use of Bitcoin and support the local community in the area rather than a massively profitable global business fair.
It would be nice to have a good, sustainable profit in the park, of course. I do not pretend that it is a non-profit initiative, but at its core it is a community initiative. We’re going to have developer workshops here, lots of workshops, education, private events, public events, meetups that bring local businesses to sell their wares for bitcoin. I mean, we had a cocktail bar here that accepted Bitcoin, family cafe, things like that.
P: What does it mean when you say “family coffee shop”?
Odell: Literally the whole family works there.
P: So it’s a separate business from the Bitcoin park?
Odell: Yes. There are three local coffee shops we have worked with, and we have two buildings here. I like to call it the campus, the Bitcoin Park campus. There is a fully functioning coffee shop that just came with the property.
So we just stumbled into this coffee shop with a full espresso machine. Like it’s a very expensive espresso machine. It’s like a $15,000 machine.
Q: Wait, did they just leave the espresso machine behind?
P: No, no, they bought it as part of the building.
Odell: My friend, that was included in the deal. They wanted to leave us as many things as possible. These chairs we are sitting on were left behind by the previous tenants. We brought this table, but it’s one of the few things we actually brought to the park. It was in Rod’s garage before, but whatever, we had a fully functioning coffee shop. We are not trying to run a coffee business, but we do enjoy coffee.
What did we decide to do? We contacted three different local coffee shops, all family-owned businesses. They come in, they staff the coffee shop during our events. They supply us with coffee bags all week when the members are here and they are working and stuff.
One of the families has their children to run the entire operation. They roast the beans, they do everything. And none of these coffee shops were Bitcoiners beforehand. So they came in, we say, “We just want to support local business. We have this new money called bitcoin,” and we got them wired to accept bitcoin.
Now they are slowly starting to get orange pills. That’s pretty cool.
Q: It’s epic. You fulfill the mission of the Bitcoin park.
P: The one you just learned 30 seconds ago in this conversation. Yes. Have it.
Odell: So at the time, we had a lot of these Bitcoin embassies in 2014 that were popping up all over the world. Many of them were just not sustainable. They did not survive.
Q: What, where was an embassy? What did it have? I wasn’t into Bitcoin in 2014. I was a degenerate.
Odell: So, like we had one in New York that I wasn’t involved with but existed in New York. They had an ATM, they had hardware wallets on display, things like that, but it was pretty much just a store.
Question: Oh, interesting.
Odell: They had these things called… I forget what they called it, but on certain days you could go there and trade bitcoin, peer-to-peer.
