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The “Grassroots Movements” panel from the Expo stage at BTC Prague 2024, moderated by Sophie Nakamoto, with four community-led projects around the table:
- Roman Martinez — community leader at Bitcoin Beach in El Zonte, El Salvador
- George Manolov — Bitcoin director at Botev Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s oldest football club and the first elite club to adopt Bitcoin
- Richard Taylor — founder of Bitcoin Runners
- Me — BTC Map
What we covered:
- What actually makes something grassroots: organic and permissionless, needing nobody’s permission to start. On BTC Map we can see the difference — communities that paid merchants to sign up saw it lapse within about six months, while the ones doing it for their own reasons keep going.
- Small ideas are underestimated. Bitcoin Beach was a dream in El Zonte in 2019, in a town where 90% of people had no bank account. Paying construction crews in Bitcoin during 2020 showed families the problem was never that their wages were too low — it was having nowhere to leave the money.
- Spend and replace. Roman’s line is that if you want adoption you have to spend sats; mine is that if you’re holding fiat you’re short Bitcoin anyway, so it makes no difference what price you bought at.
- Consistency over scale. The Manchester meetup started with me and one other person, and the only thing that kept it alive was turning up every month regardless of who came. Start small, take the action, and let it compound.
- Open source as a growth strategy. Bitcoin Runners is open source — anyone anywhere can print the shirt, wear it, and be an educator. Richard’s warning is the niche of a niche: vegan Bitcoin runners reach even fewer people.
- What doesn’t work: mailing people The Bitcoin Standard, or going in too hard in the manic phase right after you discover Bitcoin. What worked for me was free Bitcoin for kids’ courses in Bansko — parents lurked at the back of the room and got orange pilled through their children.
- Misconceptions, and how to handle them: “Bitcoin is bad for the environment” takes a deep breath and a person-to-person conversation rather than an argument, and we had a long education job with OpenStreetMap moderators when “the crypto bros” first started tagging merchants.
- Richard closed on Run for Hal — the Run For Hal challenge every 10 January, and Bitcoin Runners’ anniversary runs, raising money for ALS research in Hal Finney’s memory.