The Garden Route in South Africa, a 300km stretch of unspoilt coastline, is slowly (or quickly, depending how you look at it) turning to Bitcoin. Witsand, Mossel Bay, Plettenberg Bay, these are the hubs. But there are smaller areas in between, developing local circular economies.

Would you believe me if I told you this kid is only 6 years old? Little Ama has a bright future in surfing! (Not least of all because his coaches earn their salaries entirely in sats!)

Kids keep ripping!!!

Watch as Project Community Lead @LuthandoSABTC🇿🇦 explains the new arrangement with painted shack owners, each receiving 7,000 sats a week. Previously, the only requirement was that they either save or spend it at local merchants WITHOUT converting to fiat. Now, they also need to clean up.

A powerful new documentary is in the making: Bitcoin Rising – The Path to Freedom in South Africa A film by @npub1hl7k...fz6m Shot in our own community and @BitcoinWitsand, the film is focused on people building real economic freedom, in two very different communities, demonstrating the fact that Bitcoin is for anyone. Please consider supporting this independent film & help spread the word about grassroots Bitcoin adoption. 🎥⚡️ The full trailer is on the crowdfund page below. 👇👇👇 https://btc.ekasicenter.com/apps/H6ZttT5aHJtqFWszqAAgLGH7QUm/crowdfund

There's a future world champ among these kids. I predict sometime within the 7th or 8th Epoch...

The Crew. And the Cruiser.

Stoked!! The Surfer Kids has its first female Surf Coach! Linomtha (14) has been consistently attending the daily program for 7 years. She joined when she was only 7! She was recently appointed as junior coach, along with 6 young men. All of whom have been surfing with us for several years and have learnt advanced surf skills. Youngsters can choose to opt in as junior coaches from age 14 onwards, and can progress to senior coaching positions when they turn 18. Linomtha is the first girl to break through that threshold and be appointed as a junior coach. Recruiting (and retaining) girls has been challenging, for various reasons. But hopefully, with an inspiring role model to look up to, more girls will join! And, off course, as with our entire team, Linomtha will now earn her Junior Coaching salary paid entirely in sats! 🧡🔥🌍

8 kids. 6 medals. 1 x Gold (U12 boys Provincial Champion) 4 x Silver 1 x Bronze STOKED for The Surfer Kids!!! 🧡🔥❤️‍🔥

"Whoever is Satoshi Nakamoto, good job for making Bitcoin" @npub1g3aq...0l3q 🧡🧡🧡 @Max DeMarco

It's so cool to see how stoked these kids are on surfing!!! And having watched the program evolve over the past decade or so, watching them improve, year after year, watching the coaches learn to become more effective, and getting breakthrough results, it al makes sense now. All those years of questioning the reasons for doing this, but persisting regardless, sometimes for no reason other than persistence itself, it's beginning to some serious results. The future is bright.

Yesterday we received preliminary approval to go ahead with our plans to build a new Ekasi Support Center, to help our the community through the coming adoption phase of hyper bitcoinization. The decision was made during a local council meeting, almost a year after we submitted our original application. There's a long process that remains before building can start, but this is a major step forward. More details here: https://support.bitcoinekasi.com/

Don't trust. Visit and verify.

Good morning. Here's why Nostr matters to me. It's personal now. Elon Musk is making exaggerated claims about South Africa. His statements imply there's an ongoing genocide currently happening against white people, which there isn't. I should know. I'm white and I live in South Africa. 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 And try as I might, corrective statements I make on twitter get very little traction, far less than my average post. 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 It may be true, it may not, but it's obvious that it's in the interest of Elon's algorithm to remove all nuance from the conversation and make it as divisive as possible. 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 Case in point, this "major political party" he refers to got less than 10% of the vote in recent elections and they've been shrinking, not growing. Their habit of singing a song that calls for killing "boers" (aka white people) is absolutely despicable. But most people (of all races) can see that and have little appetite for it. Which is why there's no reason to expect that its leader, Julius Malema, will ever be South Africa's next president. Off course this may change, the future is uncertain, but as things stand now, it is a HIGHLY unlikely expectation. 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 Don't me wrong. There are huge problems in South Africa. Our current president doesn't have the backbone to condemn the very obvious racist rhetoric of parties like the EFF, while pretending that very serious concerns raised aren't real. 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 And in a way it's good that someone like Elon draws attention to it. However, I'm almost certain that his particular rhetoric isn't helping nearly as much as it's dividing people and inflaming the situation. And I wish he'd instead draw more attention to and amplify many of the more reasonable voices that do speak about this. 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 But this won't happen. If it bleeds it leads. And if someone controls the algorithm, why would they push something that draws less attention to their own platform? Simple answer is, they won't. And this is why Nostr matters, to me. It doesn't fix this today. But at least I know there's a potential solution. Ready for us, when we are ready for it.

Solo mining looks fun, and (apparently) people are finding blocks, who would've thought ! So we moved some of our BItaxe miners, donated by @Solosatoshi.com 🇺🇸 to solo mining! Still running the mini-miner donated by the legends at Braiins Mining on a pool.

We have our FIRST EVER provincial champion!!! Avethandwa just won gold at the Surfing South Africa Grommet Games in Muizenberg, Cape Town!!! (This is in addition to the 4 silver medals and 1 bronze medal collected by The Surfer Kids at this event!) We started The Surfer Kids in 2010, with nothing. Literally nothing. If you told me then, that it'd take this long to get here, I wouldn't have believed you. But I don't know how to stop, so I didn't. That's the one thing I'm really good at. Not quitting 😂 And so, here we are. Almost 15 years later. I'm not getting too excited, however. Because this is just a small step in the bigger scheme of things. We're going to get a gold medal at South African Championships. And then, at a World Surf League Qualifying Event, and finally, at the Championship Tour level. Write it down, then come back, and check in, in another 15 years. The next Italo Ferreira, John John Florence, or Gabriel Medina, a future world champion, could already be among the kids who attend our surfing program next week. From where I'm sitting, looking at this, the obvious question is: "Why not? Why is anything impossible?" And if you don't see it that way, that's because you don't understand our (very open) secret. Our biggest challenge in accomplishing this, or any other goal, is self-belief. Getting the kids, the coaches and our entire team (including myself) to believe that the impossible is in fact possible. The question is not how do you train a champion? The question is, how do you instill the necessary self-belief? And the way you do that is by giving people tools with which to overcome self doubt, with which to combat hopelessness, and create for themselves the hope that a better future is possible. Our secret weapon, first deployed in 2021 with the creation of Bitcoin Ekasi, and now bearing real fruit, and by far the most potent tool I know of, is Bitcoin.

Thank you to the World Surf League for giving Lukhangele a wild card entry to today's Vic Bay pro! He surfed well against some tough competition. Great experience to carry forward and pass on to all the youngsters at The Surfer Kids!

It's not all fun and games at The Surfer Kids. We make serious effort to teach these kids many other skills, including lifesaving. What does it take to avoid a crisis situation in the ocean? And if it cannot be avoided, what does it take to respond to a crisis situation in the ocean?