Dispatch From Guatemala's Bitcoin Lake, A Bitcoin Community Built On Grassroots Adoption
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Loading... - Coby Groff
- 29 Mar 2023
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Just a few hundred miles from El Salvador, Guatemala’s Bitcoin Lake contrasts state-led Bitcoin adoption with a promising grassroots model.
Laura and I continue our adventures in Central America with the aim of gaining an in-depth understanding of the peculiar characteristics of Bitcoin adoption in the very different countries there and reporting it without bias on our YouTube channel, “Bitcoin Explorers.”
The great curiosity that grips us after spending more than a month in El Salvador, and leaving it behind, is to try to understand what people think about Bitcoin in countries where there has been no government propaganda, no media coverage and no lousy state app like the Chivo wallet to complicate things. Countries where, therefore, adoption is not happening by decree, but solely through the free initiatives of citizens and through the work of private companies that believe in Bitcoin and build products and services on top of its protocol.
Exploring Grassroots Bitcoin Adoption In Guatemala
To find the answer, our latest destination was Guatemala, a country that is, in some ways, very similar to El Salvador. As of 2017, there were 16.5 million inhabitants there, nearly 60% of whom lived below the poverty line, likely unbanked or underbanked, and 23% lived in extreme poverty. At that point, 0.001% of Guatamalans held more than half of the country's wealth. These are ideal conditions for Bitcoin's intrinsic features to be appreciated.
Unlike El Salvador, however, Guatemalan government policy is not favorable to cryptocurrencies, in fact, it is quite the contrary. Significant laws and regulations have been passed in an attempt to harness the phenomenon and control it.
Nonetheless, around Lake Atitlán, one of the country's hottest tourist destinations, a small group of pioneers has been organizing an alternative economy experiment in Bitcoin for about a year, along the lines of what has already been done in El Zonte by Bitcoin Beach. The name chosen for this experiment is Bitcoin Lake and this was our chosen destination. Read More…
