We've all heard of El Salvador making Bitcoin legal tender under president Nayib Bukele's rule. This top down approach to introducing blockchain technology to the world has been debatable to say the least, but people are talking about Bitcoin now. What's interesting about this is that a neighboring Latin American countries like Mexico and Guatemala and have been adopting Bitcoin in a very interesting way: bottom up. What do I mean by that?
Tuk Tuk drivers at Lake Atitlan realized that gringos (which technically means "American" but the locals refer to any foreigner as gringo) have Bitcoin and will gladly pay and tip them in BTC.
Tuk Tuk drivers tell their restaurant owner friends about the benefits of accepting Bitcoin and guess what happened?
That's right!
Restaurant owners started painting their restaurant orange and advertising that they accept Bitcoin.
Restaurant owner tells the hotel owner...
And hotel owner tells the boat captain...
And that's it.
Underbanked folks in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala are now part of a circular economy thanks to voluntary Bitcoin adoption; an amazing phenomenon to witness.
This is awesome, but you know what's even more awesome? That all of these folks could be also using the HIVE ecosystem to share photos through liketu or share a story with their friends on peakd or using Threads to share quick stories and/or links about their services, and when they earn HIVE by doing so, they can use it to pay for their bread, airtime, boat ride by using the v4v.app developed by @brianoflondon to instantly bridge HIVE to the Lightning network and pay for Lightning invoices with no friction whatsoever!
If you want to see this in action, just check out this short video I made of me paying for pizza last year for #Bitcoinpizzaday:
It was the first time the restaurant accepted any Bitcoin ever, the employees had no idea what was going on, but the guys who set up the Bitcoin Lightning terminal assured them that they received the money by showing them their account and probably helping them convert it to local currency.
The point is I was able to pay for food with HIVE!
This is HUGE!
If we can continue to show folks how they can earn value by providing value to other people (value for value) they can find other people in their community to accept that value in the form of cryptocurrency in exchange for goods and services, all without the need for a bank or centralized custodian.
Proof Of Brain as it's referred to is an awesome way to allow anybody (techical and non-technical) to distribute and receive value within our #HIVE ecosystem.
If you want to learn more about the growing HIVE ecosystem tune in to @cttpodcast on Twitter Spaces and Discord happening every Saturday (today!).
See you there!
Image of paying with HIVE created using Midjourney and edited using Canva.