- Cryptocurrency evangelists are encouraging local populations around the world to use digital tokens.
- They argue bitcoin can improve the livelihoods of millions of marginalized or impoverished people.
- Critics say they are doing 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 coastline pioneered the use of the cryptocurrency.
After receiving a substantial 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 surf 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 buying groceries to paying rent. Bitcoin influencers and enthusiasts from around the world have also flocked to the crypto paradise, and some have even started to copy Peterson’s experiment elsewhere.
While bitcoin is still a volatile currency — and has lost more than half its value this year — its defenders argue 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 currency. From Guatemala to South Africa, here are some of the newest 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 town of Panajachel, Guatemala.
A devout Christian, Melder says Bitcoin Lake, the name of his new initiative, will create economic opportunities in Panajachel and could be a model for Christian missionaries who work in economically depressed areas.
Like Peterson of Bitcoin Beach, he urges local businesses to accept bitcoin as payment and leads weekly classes about bitcoin with about 20 teenagers. Melder says he wants to sow the “seeds” of bitcoin belief so children are prepared to use the cryptocurrency when they’re older.
What distinguishes Bitcoin Lake, however, 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 he then plans to donate the cryptocurrency back to the town. “We can basically pay people for their poop,” says Melder, who also plans to use garbage, surplus methane, and used cooking oil to mine bitcoin.
We can basically pay people for their 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 support from the town’s mayor.
Bitcoin enthusiasts are building a network across Peru
In 2020, a Californian named Rich Swisher paired up with Valentin Popescu, a Romanian who lives in Peru, to start another project meant to persuade impoverished people across Peru to use bitcoin as their currency. The project, called Motiv, uses a network of community leaders across the country including business owners and educators.
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.
Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
One of these bitcoin networks orbits around Olger Alarcon, 47, who lives in Lima, Peru’s capital. Alarcon owned a shoe-manufacturing business that he shut down when the coronavirus pandemic ravaged Peru.
Months later, Motiv financed — in bitcoin — a revival of Alarcon’s business. Alarcon now pays his employees in bitcoin, receives bitcoin from some customers, and pays for some materials in the cryptocurrency. “It has been a help for my entire 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 going on in their lives,” Swisher says of the people Motiv helps, adding that he was seeking to “refire” their lives, “but do it on bitcoin.”
A South African surfer is turning a poor neighborhood into a crypto haven
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 city on the South African coast.
Once he saw Bitcoin Beach achieve worldwide acclaim earlier that year, he thought he would try to recreate the project in Ekasi, the neighborhood where Vivier had started a nonprofit teaching children how to surf.
Now, Vivier’s surf instructors all accept payment through bitcoin, nearby convenience stores take the cryptocurrency as payment, and he recently launched a bitcoin-education 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 doesn’t see bitcoin tourists coming to use the cryptocurrency in Ekasi’s local economy anytime soon.
But like Peterson, Melder, and Swisher, Vivier contends that with the help of bitcoin the residents of Ekasi can rise above poverty. Bitcoin isn’t meant only for speculators or investors, he says: “Bitcoin was invented to improve the life of the majority of people on this planet.”
But not everybody is convinced their activities are helping
Not everyone is convinced these bitcoin evangelists are actually helping the communities where they operate.
Jorge Cuéllar, a professor at Dartmouth University who has researched the growth of cryptocurrency communities in Latin America, notes these projects are often experimenting on the backs of the world’s most economically precarious.
“There’s a strategic move by bitcoin enthusiasts to locate sites where bitcoin will have the most adoption,” he told Insider. “And that means, from their perception, the most economically desperate sites.”
The volatility is much more real for the people that they’re trying to bring into crypto.
Cuéllar describes bitcoin, with its constantly fluctuating values, as a mismatch for those who don’t have the financial cushions of millionaires.
“The volatility is much more real for the 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 “emancipating” people from poverty.
Most wealthier communities are not using bitcoin for daily purchases, she said. “Why would you think the poor would use bitcoin as payment,” she added, “when we’re not?”
