“Everything we do in the community is related to bitcoin. It’s either funded by bitcoin, learning about bitcoin, or being taught or implemented by bitcoiners,” Melder told Bitcoin Magazine. “Our three goals in the community are to learn about bitcoin, create a bitcoin circular economy, and clean the environment with bitcoin mining as a financial incentive.”
While Bitcoin Lake tackles the latter, the other two goals have not been sidelined. On the education front, the project has helped introduce Bitcoin-related courses to the local educational center Centro Educativo Josué.
“The kids there are taught about all aspects of Bitcoin, from ‘what is money?’, ‘what is inflation?’, ‘why bitcoin was created’, to the basics of bitcoin mining, setting up a bitcoin full node, etc .” detailed Melder. “We’re proud to say that we’ve been doing this since January 2022, developing our own curriculum along the way, and we’ve had Bitcoiners from all over the world come and help.”
The work that began at the local school has since spread to a wider audience in the city, Melder said, in an effort to help people of all ages learn more about the world of peer-to-peer digital money.
“We’ve held bitcoin educational meetings for adults and business owners in the community and tried to include indigenous leaders as well,” he said.
With a better understanding of the technology, adoption is easier as users and business owners are not caught off guard or forced to use bitcoin. Rather, a movement begins, naturally enough.
“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.
Business in Panajachel, Guatemala accepts bitcoin. (Photo/Bitcoin Lake)
As awareness of Bitcoin grows and adoption continues to increase, the community is set to continue expanding its initiatives. On the mining front, Melder expects to further develop the reuse of wasted and stranded resources to increase the community’s fixed income and improve the efficiency of the lake’s cleanup even more.
“Our environmental cleanup/Bitcoin mining initiative has just started, but will grow to the point in about a year where we can actually take unsorted landfill waste (new or old) and turn it into a clean energy source to mine bitcoin,” Melder predicted. “We are working with a group from the UK to bring this to life and it will have a huge impact in Panajachel and Guatemala as we now have a financial incentive to clean up the massive waste problem that exists in Guatemala and in most developing countries. We are proud that we will be the first to market with this technology.”
Landfill in Panajachel, Guatemala. (Photo/Bitcoin Lake)
