Why create a Bitcoin Economy in Jericoacoara Village?

From the early days, Bitcoin has promised to allow us to bankroll the unbanked and return the power of governments and financial institutions to the individual. However, until recently, this promise has remained elusive.

In Jericoacoara Village, despite being one of the most popular tourist destinations on the planet, we do not have a single ATM, so, to move cash here is complicated and expensive. We were forgotten by the banks, but now we have Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Beach Brazil is an independent movement inspired by the original Bitcoin Beach experiment in El Zonte, to ensure that Bitcoin's true potential is realized and that those excluded from the banking system are the main beneficiaries. We believe if a local economy is created with Bitcoin's support, new opportunities will open up for the community members.

How Bitcoin Beach Brazil experiment get started?

The implementation of a Bitcoin Economy requires a focus on the social aspect of the experiment. To make the mass adoption happen, we need to spend Bitcoin with local people who never got in touch with Bitcoin before, making small real transactions to teach how to use this new kind of money, otherwise, it would be impossible.

Using an initial donation of 0.02 BTC from our founder, we started to create Jericoacoara's Bitcoin Economy by helping more than 120 users (local workers, artisans, fishermen, street artists) to create Lightning wallets, and then, we helped10 local businesses to accept Bitcoin as payment providing training and promotional material, making it without any help or permission from the state.

Also, we're running a local Bitcoin and Lightning Node for educational purposes (already the second-largest node in Brazil), we created a guide to help small communities to replicate our experiment and we suggested to the congress Adopt Bitcoin as Legal Tender in Brazil, following El Salvador initiative. Finally, we are running this crowdfunding campaign using BTCPayServer on our local node to get funded and consolidate Jericoacoara's Bitcoin Economy to serve the Bitcoin community as a touristic destination.

Here is a full list of what you can buy with Bitcoin at Jericoacoara Village and a map of the businesses where you can use Bitcoin as payment. For more information check out our website,Instagram or Twitter and watch the videos below:

How and for what will donations be used?

We will use all Bitcoin donations to onboard new users, maintain an office, hire employees, create educational and promotional materials, buy hardware, develop software, contribute to local social projects and pay expenses for services provided by the local people who participate in the work we do, following the lessons of the Original Bitcoin Beach Experiment, in El Zonte.

We will not convert Bitcoin donations into fiat currency.

Donors

If you're a Bitcoin company, or an individual donor donating over 1000 USD and would like to have your logo/avatar listed in the Donors section, please get in touch via bitcoinbeachbr@pm.me after you make a donation, with an invoice or a transaction ID and a logo/avatar in .png (200 x 200 px)