Bitcoin Churches, Bitcoin Factories, and Bitcoin Circular Economies.
There’s a valid concern in the African Bitcoin space voiced by @npub18yr2...8czq at the recent Africa Bitcoin Conference:
Too many people are building Bitcoin churches, not enough people are building Bitcoin factories.
https://www.youtube.com/live/iXAyxlGcSPo?si=mWZ7jhPnzLX_CdpP&t=2743
In the same vein, there’s a growing suspicion that Bitcoin Circular Economies (BCEs) aren’t factories because it’s not immediately obvious how they scale. Therefore some conclude that BCEs are churches.
Let’s define some terms:
BITCOIN CHURCHES are projects that only preach adoption. Install a wallet, send sats, make one transaction, and walk away. Job done. It looks good on camera, but nothing changes on the ground. It's adoption theatre, as described by @Anita 🏳️🌈 .
BITCOIN FACTORIES, by contrast, scale adoption. They build the tools, infrastructure, businesses and networks that make Bitcoin usable for millions.
South Africa offers two excellent examples:
@MoneyBadger integrated Bitcoin payments into existing merchant POS systems, enabling Lightning payments at 700 000 locations nationwide.
@npub1nv4j...x0gr built a Bitcoin financial services provider that works on non-internet-connected feature phones.
So where do BITCOIN CIRCULAR ECONOMIES (BCEs) fit in?
In his recent talk at the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Mauritius, our project founder, Hermann, outlined what BCEs are and why they matter.
https://www.youtube.com/live/nyL9tYp1rnA?si=1LWc70pnZZWuSzia&t=784
Hermann agrees with Femi: we need more factories. We don’t need churches where there’s only talk and no action. And we do need a million different ways for Africans to earn, spend, and save Bitcoin. And that’s precisely why we need BCEs.
FIRST: BECAUSE BCES INSPIRE FACTORY BUILDERS.
MoneyBadger CEO Carel van Wyk is a South African Bitcoin OG. He co-founded Luno (Africa’s oldest operational Bitcoin exchange) and built an on-chain Bitcoin payments solution in 2017. It failed. He subsequently lost interest in Bitcoin as a payment network.
That changed with the Lightning Network and Bitcoin Ekasi. Seeing people actually use Bitcoin in everyday life reignited his drive to build the factory we needed.
Carel (and part of his team) visited Bitcoin Ekasi and personally painted the MoneyBadger logo. Of nearly 50 murals we’ve done he’s the only company CEO to have painted one himself.
That’s not marketing. That’s a real connection. That’s real inspiration turning into action.
Similarly, Kgothatso Ngako, Founder & Catalyst at Machankura, was the first person to get on a plane and visit Bitcoin Ekasi in June 2022, only weeks after Machankura went live. Bitcoin Ekasi provided a real community in which to test features and functionality.
Yes, BCEs today don’t scale adoption to hundreds of thousands, or millions. They’re not factories. At least not yet.
But they are places where factory builders come to be inspired. And, somewhat ironically, one could call that a church.
SECOND: BCEs WILL EVOLVE.
We MUST understand: a BCE is the network of businesses and individuals who use Bitcoin in that community, it is NOT the project that initiated the network.
Today, BCEs are necessarily project-led, and hyper-local, because that’s what works. And many of them are funded through donations that power the flow of sats into their local community. And that’s totally fine, as a start.
But this will change with time. BCE builders must think bigger. And not in terms of numbers. BCE builders should NOT try to onboard and educate 5,000 merchants using existing tools. That would be inefficient and a waste of time.
What this means is the following:
BCEs can (and should) become factories themselves, even if they’re small ones. They should not remain forever completely dependent on outside funding. Instead they should innovate ways for people to earn, spend, and save in Bitcoin.
BCEs should themselves aspire to build tools that can scale Bitcoin. If BCEs can inspire factory builders (like Carel and Kgothatso) then BCEs can also produce factory builders. Even if they don’t meet that high bar, that’s OK, as long as they’re building.
The key question for BCE builders should NOT be:
“How do I raise more funding and get more donations?”
The key questions should be:
“While I’m fundraising and sourcing donations, what am I doing to build for sustainability?”
“Can I innovate new ways for people to earn, spend and save in Bitcoin?”
“Where can I partner with other BCEs and what can I learn from them?”
Ultimately, YOU, the BCE builder that initiated this project that sustains the early stages of the BCE in your community, should be building for sustainability.
You should be building a BCE that benefits from, but is ultimately not entirely dependent on your input.
