BREAKDOWN: An Interview With Bitcoin Beach, the Community That Inspired El Salvador to Adopt the Bitcoin Standard
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2021
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Featuring Bitcoin Beach’s Mike Peterson.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.
On today’s episode, NLW is joined by Mike Peterson, director of Bitcoin Beach. Bitcoin Beach is a community project in El Salvador that has spent the last two years helping individuals and companies integrate bitcoin into their daily lives and long-term habits. President Nayib Bukele cited Bitcoin Beach in inspiring El Salvador’s bitcoin legal tender law.
In this interview, NLW and Mike discuss:
- How he came to reside in El Salvador
- How the bitcoin community project started
- What drove community adoption at the beginning
- How remittances and COVID-19 solidified the value of BTC to the community
- How bitcoin has changed how people think about investing
- How international bitcoiners such as Miles Suter and Jack Mallers got to know the project
- Where the project stands today (complete with 22 different community initiatives)
- How bitcoiners can get involved
Find our guest online:
Twitter: @Bitcoinbeach
Web: www.bitcoinbeach.com
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Nexo.io lets you borrow against your crypto at 6.9% APR, earn up to 12% on your idle assets, and exchange instantly between 100+ market pairs with the tap of a button. Get started at nexo.io.
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Image credit: Mike Peterson/Bitcoin Beach
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I've seen that when people come down. They're kind of shocked at how sophisticated these users are, |
| 0:05.4 | especially for a lot of them they're living in poverty. And I tell them, hey, these people have made |
| 0:09.7 | 10 times as many Bitcoin transactions as you have, like in real world settings. Even when |
| 0:15.2 | strike came down, they were wondering, why do people keep sending money back and forth between |
| 0:20.4 | the strike |
| 0:20.9 | wallet and the Bitcoin Beach wallet? |
| 0:23.2 | Well, this is their bootstrap trading engine. |
| 0:26.1 | When they want to go into Bitcoin, they send it out a strike into the Bitcoin Beach wallet. |
| 0:30.0 | When they want to go to dollars, they send it out of the Bitcoin Beach wallet into |
| 0:32.7 | strike. |
| 0:33.9 | And they were kind of blown away like, wow, we never thought people would use it like that. |
| 0:39.4 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:43.6 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:50.5 | The Breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:57.0 | What's going on, guys? It is Friday, June 11th, and today I am so excited to bring you a conversation with Bitcoin Beach's Michael Peterson. |
| 1:07.9 | If you were on Nick Carter's Twitter space on Tuesday night where El Salvador's president, |
| 1:13.7 | Naim Buckele, popped in to answer questions for about an hour, you heard Mike Peterson talk. |
| 1:19.8 | You see, Bitcoin Beach is a project in El Salvador that has been running for a couple of years now, |
| 1:25.6 | and they set out to show that, one, Bitcoin could be used |
| 1:29.3 | day-to-day as well as it could be used as a long-term investing and saving technology, and |
| 1:34.1 | two, that Bitcoin wasn't just for rich people. In fact, the poorest of the poor could often |
| 1:39.3 | find even more empowerment in it than the rich that we normally associated with. |
... |
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