This Bitcoin-themed bar in Mexico City is a hub for the crypto community.

It’s 7pm on a Thursday and I’m drinking a beer next to a Bitcoin ATM.

On the wall in front of me is an illustration of a masked Satoshi Nakamoto: “Don’t Delay—Be Your Own Bank,” it announces. It is one of several portraits of Satoshi, including one that shows him taking off a dollar bill as if he were a superhero. (The portraits are particularly creative, since no one knows who Satoshi – a pseudonym – really is.) A TV is mounted above the bar, displaying the current values ​​of hundreds of cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin occupies the largest space on the screen, followed by Ethereum and Binance Coin, and then other coins, many with squares so small as to be imperceptible. The numbers on the screen fluctuate steadily: One Bitcoin is worth $21,163.64, then $21,112.75, then $21,101.05. Behind me is a case full of Bitcoin memorabilia for sale: mugs, T-shirts, rings.

This is the Bitcoin Embassy Bar, a hip two-story establishment in the Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City. It’s a place where you can use Bitcoin to pay for a hot dog (Doge Coind, Multidoge or Dogechain, whichever you like), or exchange pesos to reload your Bitcoin wallet. It also hopes to be a gathering place for the Bitcoin community in Latin America. In doing so, it weaves a kind of tension: creating a physical gathering space for a community that is in its DNA digital.

Latin America is arguably the most important testing ground for building physical infrastructure and communities around digital currencies – from El Salvador to Puerto Rico to Guatemala. Depending on how you feel about crypto, this is either incredibly exciting or incredibly problematic. According to a report by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, the use of cryptocurrencies in Latin America increased by 1,370 percent between 2019 and 2021. Mainstream adoption is still a long way off, but crypto proponents are making big promises in the region: that a new , decentralized financial system can promote financial inclusion, fight corruption and serve as a counterweight to hyperinflation. Still, those promises are hard to keep—and, as in the case of El Salvador, those who pay the real price for failure are rarely people with red lasers shooting out of their eyes on Twitter.

Lorena Ortiz, co-founder and owner of Bitcoin Embassy Bar, first started investing in Bitcoin in 2017. She needed quick cash for a trip to Japan – her friend produced a tour and invited her to join. “It made perfect sense to me to have a tool that could help people break free from the failed system we live with,” said Ortiz, 33. Bitcoin was punk, and so was she. Around November, she started with a small investment of around $25 USD. In December, Bitcoin hit an all-time high. But Ortiz decided to forego the trip to dedicate himself to his newfound crypto passion.*

In early 2018, Ortiz began talking to the bar’s co-founder, David Noriega, about the need for a physical gathering place for Bitcoiners in Mexico City. Noriega brought the technical Bitcoin experience and Ortiz knew how to run a restaurant. The bar opened its doors in December of the same year.

Since then, Ortiz said, the business has grown mainly through word of mouth. There are ups and downs: During bull markets, she said, the not-yet-converted often wander in with questions about Bitcoin. During bear markets, most of Ortiz’s clients are more dedicated Bitcoiners, who attend frequent meetings and share tips. Shortly after our interview, the bar’s second floor welcomed 20 or so bitcoiners to one such meeting on Bitcoin myths, led by a Colombian crypto-influencer. During meetings, up to 50 percent of customers pay in Bitcoin, Ortiz said, but that drops to 10 or 20 percent when it’s not an event. Placed around the bar are handouts with tips for avoiding crypto scams – and this, Ortiz says, is one of her core goals: to create a space where people can learn and ask questions.

The Bitcoin Embassy Bar is not the first business of its kind: there is a coffee bar in Prague, a bar in Manhattan and a burger bar in LA that follow similar models. This makes sense, because for its core believers, Bitcoin is “not an investment, but an ideology,” Ortiz said.

Of course, it is worth remembering that the community formed around said ideology includes many documented cases of misogyny, racism, harassment, extremism, anti-Semitism, conspiracy and outright fraud. The crypto community is often hostile to outsiders or critics, and online crypto discourse is notorious for its toxicity – it’s hard to imagine that “crypto bro” culture is a culture worth recreating. But while it’s important to acknowledge the more harmful elements of this ecosystem, it’s also not necessarily fair to use the loudest, most problematic voices to generalize about such a large group of people. A recent Pew survey found that 16 percent of American adults have invested in, traded, or used a cryptocurrency. And among this community, meeting rooms and meetings are fundamental. “All revolutions, all social movements, all these kinds of systemic disruptions wouldn’t be possible if a small minority hadn’t started to grow, grow, grow through society,” Ortiz told me. In Latin America, she continued, “we have a deeply rooted tradition of creating community … in person.”

Mexico’s crypto ecosystem has grown since the bar opened – four years in Bitcoin is equivalent to 20 normal years, says Ortiz. In May 2021, Mexico-based Bitso, a cryptocurrency exchange, became Latin America’s first cryptocurrency unicorn, and in December of the same year, department store Elektra announced that it would accept Bitcoin for online sales. Billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the (very!) controversial chairman of Grupo Elektra, is probably the country’s most influential Bitcoin advocate – in June 2021 he announced that Banco Azteca, which he also heads, would attempt to become the first Mexican bank to accept Bitcoin . (Mexican regulators quickly shot down this proposal.) In 2022, Salinas Pliego announced that 60 percent of his liquid portfolio was in Bitcoin or Bitcoin stocks.

Salinas Pliego was a topic of conversation at the first meeting I attended at the Bitcoin Embassy Bar, which featured a lawyer, a consultant and an economics professor discussing whether Bitcoin could – and should – be regulated. Salinas Pliego has a long-standing relationship with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and one contestant wanted to know if he could convert the president to a Bitcoiner. (Consensus: no.)

That night’s conversation lasted about an hour and a half, with attendees collectively rolling their eyes at Sam Bankman-Fried for smearing crypto’s reputation and using their iPhones to scroll between Instagram, Twitter and Bitcoin wallets. A Brit who recently moved to Mexico tried to get me to open a Bitcoin wallet right then and there (I don’t own crypto), and a Mexican working in a crypto start-up asked what I, as a newcomer, thought were the biggest the advantages and disadvantages of Bitcoin. Someone at the table next to me, I noticed, had a Sharpie rendering of the Bitcoin logo drawn on the thumbnail. The wall in front of us held a neon sign that read Eat Sleep Crypto Repeat and a large board with an illustration of an alien ship, complete with caption We’re going to the moon.

But the moon, it turns out, is still pretty far away. As I reported this story, I couldn’t stop thinking about one chirping Ortiz wrote in early January: One of the city pipes connected to the restaurant was broken, and as a result the restaurant had problems with leaking wastewater. They had been unable to get local authorities to do anything for the past month and were hoping their followers could help up the pressure on Twitter.

This struck me as the perfect representation of what it’s like to run a Bitcoin bar: You can spend all the time you want talking about a decentralized, digital, financially autonomous future. But at the end of the day, you’re still stuck with bulky government bureaucracy and sewage.

When I asked Ortiz about this, she laughed. It’s a familiar sensation: Every time she goes to the bank, has to knock on the door of government officials or juggles a headache that drains the question, “It’s like coming back to earth: ‘Hey, Lore, don’t fly away. This is your reality ,” she told me. She treats it as a lesson. “Because at the end of the day, you have to know where you stand.”

Here are some stories from the recent past of Future Tense.

Future Tense Fiction

January’s story was “Bigfeet” by Future Tense editor Torie Bosch. Written as if it were a New Yorker-esque article, Bosch’s brilliant fiction debut chronicles a billionaire’s revenge-driven quest to “exterminate” a bigfoot-like creature. The story is told largely from the perspective of Dr. Shelley, one of the scientists who, sequestered on a remote island, helped combine monkey, cow and bear DNA to create the Bigfeet: docile, bipedal creatures that look like “a bizarre AI rendering. of the traditional Bigfoot,” complete with purple tongues. In a response essay, conservationist Challie Facemire discusses the unforeseen consequences of introducing species where they do not belong.

Wish we had published this

“Why my bittersweet relationship with Shein had to end,” by Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review

Future Tense recommends

After finding myself in a bit of a streaming rut last month, I finally followed the recommendations to watch Bad sisters on Apple TV+. The 10-episode first season premiered in August, and the show was recently renewed for a second season. It follows the five Garvey sisters – Eva, Becka, Bibi, Ursula and Grace – and begins by showing the body of John Paul, Grace’s husband, in a coffin. We quickly learn that Eva, Becka, Bibi, and Ursula tried to kill John Paul, who is presented as controlling, manipulative, and emotionally abusive (at first…he eventually becomes much worse). The show weaves storylines from the past and present – ​​the events leading up to John Paul’s death, and the fallout from it – and guides us through stunning Irish landscapes, which together with the show’s dark but clever humor, serve a kind of numbing function for the heavy themes that is embedded in the plot. Reviewers have pointed out that the series oversimplifies many of these themes and flattens naturally complex characters, and I think that’s true—we walk away with little understanding of John Paul as anything other than a caricature of misogyny, for example. But at the end of the day, it’s just really entertaining TV.

What next: TBD

On Friday’s episode of Slate’s technology podcast, host Lizzie O’Leary interviewed Tim Requarth, a Slate contributing writer, about how COVID is really affecting our immune systems. Last week, Lizzie spoke with the Washington Post’s Will Oremus about what the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT means for consumers. She also spoke with Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen about why the Department of Justice believes that Google’s ad-tech business must be broken up, and whether that is actually likely to happen. And on Sunday, Lizzie will be joined by Ron Lieber of the New York Times to discuss why JPMorgan says it was duped by a young founder who promised to help students get financial aid — and what made her story so magnetic in the first place.

Future Tense is a partnership between Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.