Bitcoin evangelists want the world’s poor to use crypto

• Cryptocurrency evangelists are encouraging local populations around the world to use digital tokens.
• They claim that bitcoin can improve the livelihoods of millions of marginalized or poor people.
• Critics say they do more harm than good.

Two years before El Salvador became the first country to declare bitcoin as legal tender, a small project along the country’s coast pioneered the use of the cryptocurrency.

After receiving a significant sum of bitcoin from an anonymous donor in 2019, Michael Peterson – a 47-year-old businessman from California – and a group of local volunteers transformed the small Salvadoran surfing town of El Zonte into a mecca for bitcoin evangelists through a project they called Bitcoin Beach.

Today, locals in El Zonte can use the cryptocurrency for everything from grocery shopping to paying rent. Bitcoin influencers and enthusiasts from around the world have also flocked to the crypto haven, and some have even begun to copy Peterson’s experiment elsewhere.

While bitcoin remains a volatile currency – having lost more than half its value this year – its defenders claim it can help “bank the unbank”, build savings and beat inflation.

These bitcoin evangelists have decided to try to persuade the world’s poor to use bitcoin as a currency. From Guatemala to South Africa, here are some of the latest global cryptocurrency experiments.

Bitcoin Lake in Guatemala plans to mine bitcoin – using poop

In late 2021, Patrick Melder, a 54-year-old former surgeon from Atlanta, launched a project to bring bitcoin to the lakeside city of Panajachel, Guatemala.

A devout Christian, Melder says Bitcoin Lake, the name of his new initiative, will create economic opportunities in Panajachel and can be a model for Christian missionaries working in economically depressed areas.

Like Peterson of Bitcoin Beach, he encourages local businesses to accept bitcoin as payment and leads weekly classes on bitcoin with about 20 teenagers. Melder says he wants to sow the “seeds” of bitcoin faith so that children are prepared to use the cryptocurrency as they grow older.

However, what sets Bitcoin Lake apart is bitcoin mining. Melder and his team say they have secured a machine that converts human waste into electricity, which he intends to use to mine bitcoin. And then he plans to donate the cryptocurrency back to the city. “We can basically pay people for stern decks,” says Melder, who also plans to use trash, excess methane and used cooking oil to mine bitcoin.

We can basically pay people to poop.

While Bitcoin Lake is less than a year old, he says he has already persuaded more than 100 businesses to accept the cryptocurrency and has received the support of the city’s mayor.

Bitcoin enthusiasts are building a network across Peru

In 2020, a Californian named Rich Swisher was paired with Valentin Popescu, a Romanian living in Peru, to start another project intended to persuade poor people across Peru to use bitcoin as currency. The project, called Motiv, uses a network of community leaders across the country, including business owners and teachers.

These leaders act as hubs for the local bitcoin project, promoting the coin to their neighbors. So far, Motiv says it has opened 15 hubs across the country and more than 60 businesses accept the cryptocurrency.

One of these bitcoin networks revolves around Olger Alarcon, 47, who lives in Lima, Peru’s capital. Alarcon owned a shoe manufacturer that he shut down when the coronavirus pandemic ravaged Peru.

Months later, Motiv funded – in bitcoin – a revival of Alarcon’s business. Alarcon now pays its employees in bitcoin, receives bitcoin from some customers, and pays for some materials in the cryptocurrency. “It’s been a help to my whole family,” he told Insider.

Motiv says it has also persuaded nearby businesses to accept bitcoin from Alarcon and his employees. “They’re at death’s door — nothing’s happening in their lives,” Swisher says of the people Motiv helps, adding that he tried to “fire” their lives, “but do it on bitcoin.”

A South African surfer turns a poor neighborhood into a crypto paradise

In August 2021, Hermann Vivier, a 36-year-old surfer from South Africa, started an initiative to bring bitcoin to a small neighborhood in Mossel Bay, a town on the South African coast.

When he saw Bitcoin Beach achieve worldwide recognition earlier that year, he thought he’d try to replicate the project in Ekasi, the neighborhood where Vivier had started a non-profit teaching children to surf.

Now all of Vivier’s surf instructors accept payment through bitcoin, nearby convenience stores accept the cryptocurrency as payment, and he recently launched a bitcoin training program for children.

Unlike Bitcoin Beach or Bitcoin Lake, which are located in heavily touristed areas, Vivier’s project is in a township – a poor, majority black neighborhood that is a legacy of apartheid. Vivier therefore does not see bitcoin tourists coming to use the cryptocurrency in Ekasi’s local economy anytime soon.

But like Peterson, Melder and Swisher, Vivier claims that with the help of bitcoin, the residents of Ekasi can rise above poverty. Bitcoin is not just meant for speculators or investors, he says: “Bitcoin was invented to improve the lives of most people on this planet.”

But not everyone is convinced that their activities help

Not everyone is convinced that these bitcoin evangelists are actually helping the communities in which they operate.

Jorge Cuéllar, a professor at Dartmouth University who has researched the growth of cryptocurrency communities in Latin America, notes that these projects often experiment on the backs of the world’s most economically insecure.

“It’s a strategic move by bitcoin enthusiasts to find sites where bitcoin will have the most adoption,” he told Insider. “And that means, in their view, the most financially desperate sites.”

The volatility is much more real to the people that they are trying to bring into crypto.

Cuéllar describes bitcoin, with its constantly fluctuating values, as a mismatch for those who do not have the financial cushions of millionaires.

“The volatility is much more real for people that they’re trying to bring into crypto,” he said.

Similarly, Mariel Garcia Llorens, an anthropologist pursuing her doctorate at the University of California at Davis, is skeptical of claims like Motiv’s that bitcoin evangelists are “liberating” people from poverty.

Most wealthier communities don’t use bitcoin for day-to-day purchases, she said. “Why do you think the poor would use bitcoin as payment,” she added, “when we’re not?”