Excerpt
I talk with Hermann from Bitcoin Ekasi about their journey in building a Bitcoin circular economy—what worked, what failed, and the lessons learned along the way. Watch now to discover the reality of Bitcoin adoption!
Transcript
We’re here at the Bitcoin Ekasi Surf Center at Diaz Beach in Mossel Bay, South Africa. Here, right behind me, you can see the surfer kids practicing. And on top of the hill, you can see the hearts of the Bitcoin Ekasi township. We’re going to talk with Hermann today. Hermann is the initiator of Bitcoin Ekasi. He started it in 2021. And we are interested in how it has changed from our last visit in May 2022 up until now in February 2025. Hi, Hermann. Hello. I’ve been here three years ago, almost exactly, in May 2022, the first time. And now it’s February 25. Yeah. And this place looks completely changed. I mean, it’s the same place, but the surfboards are very secure now. The last time we were sitting here, one of the surfboards fell on me and almost killed me. Yeah. So this time. You would have been fine, but yeah. I would have been fine. I don’t know. So you started this great project here, Bitcoin Ekasi, in 2021? 2021, yeah. 2021, yeah. Since then, a lot of things have changed. And I would like to talk about the progress, the place like on the mountain, the township, in the township itself, and also in the surf center here, all the changes that have been happening. So. Yeah. It’s a lot of changes. Absolutely. So why don’t you please, for all the people who haven’t heard about Bitcoin Ekasi before, give a short introduction on the project and why you started it? The project is based on a pre-existing organization called the Surfer Kids. And so the building we’re in at the moment actually belongs to the Surfer Kids. How Bitcoin Ekasi ties into that is it pays salaries for staff who work here in Bitcoin. And so that’s really the only thing that changed between 2021 and now. Not the only thing. That’s where it started. That was the first big change. Yeah. We had this nonprofit organization and we had kids coming down to the beach on a daily basis to learn surfing. And we were doing all of the stuff related to the surf program and we’re still doing now. But then in 2021, we… Yeah, go ahead. In 2021, we basically started paying salaries for the staff in bitcoin. And that attracted a bit of attention. And then things like this started happening, which is funding and all kinds of things. It brought more attention, it brought more interest to the program. You’ve seen this film, like a feeling. I haven’t seen it, to be honest. Okay. Well, this is kind of where a lot of the traction started. So Obi came to South Africa and made this little 12 minute mini documentary. Maybe I have seen it in 23. Yeah, in 23. July 2023. And that kind of snowballed into a lot of other things that has happened since. But the renovation of this building is thanks to this film. So we had a fundraiser following this film. And that was very successful. And we raised enough money to renovate this building. There’s one very funny scene in this film where she walks into the old place and she didn’t have a surboard fall on her head, but she did have a cockroach crawl on her head. Oh. I’m not sure which is worse. And so, yeah, that’s in the movie actually. It’s quite funny. Okay. So you started paying the surfer kids coaches in bitcoin. That was the beginning and Luthando. Yeah. Was the one you, how did you identify him that he could be the guy who is going to his community, introducing the merchants to Bitcoin and trying to onboard them? Well, he was the default choice because he was the only coach that was left at that point. Prior to Bitcoin, I see the non-profit, the surfer kids was heavily reliant on funding coming through the tourism industry, which is related to the tourism business that my wife and I used to operate together. She now operates that on her own. I’m not involved with that anymore. I’m still a co-owner, but I don’t deal with that anymore. You just reap the benefits. I just reap the benefits. Yeah. And I do have to sign papers every now and then. No. So we funded the non-profit through the tourism industry and then obviously COVID destroyed the tourism industry. Basically brought tourism to a standstill. And that had an impact on the non-profit where we had to let coaches go. And Luthando was the only coach left by the time we started with Ekasi. So he was the default option. But he did show a lot of interest in the idea when I first mentioned it to him. Okay. Yeah, I think that’s important that people have their own interest out of their own, how shall I say? It comes from them. Yeah. And not you push it onto them. Yeah. So in May 22, we were then visiting the Ekasi and going to Nusihle, who was the first one to accept bitcoin in her shop. And then you had about, I don’t know, five or six merchants or something? Yeah, probably something like that. Sounds about right. How many are it now? It’s around between 30 and 35. Wow. But that’s not only in the township. That’s, we’ve got a few other shops around this area and around town. That we onboarded because we used them. And so, I mean, we onboard places that we would frequently go to. It’s the same reason why we had the hotel restaurant on board until recently. But you are not accepting it anymore now? No, no, it’s got to do with the breakup of the partnership there. So I told the story to Martina. It’s a sad story. But the person in our owns the place is not interested anymore. Oh, that’s sad. Unfortunately, yeah. And I don’t go there anymore either because… Oh. No, the person in our owns it is not a… It’s not someone I want to support. Oh, okay. Good to know. Oh, that’s sad because it would have been such a great symbiosis here. It was, yeah, it was. It really was. It really was. I mean, we still use the hotel because it’s the best location. Like, you just, you know, you can’t get… You walk over to minutes. Exactly. Yeah. So, but we were making great progress. We almost had, we almost got to a point where we could pay the hotel in bitcoin as well. And then the partnership broke up and the one part of that left, he was the one that was willing to accept bitcoin, the other part of that stayed behind. It’s not interesting. We were just talking to the people working there, the waitresses, and they were like, yeah, last week a lot of Bitcoiners were here and this was great. We all wanted to work because they tip so well in bitcoin. And I said to them, and do you still have it? And they said, no, they were shopping at Pick and Pay. And I said, yeah, well, that’s perfectly fine. But do you still have the wallet? I said to one of them and she said, no. And I just thought to myself, well, what a pity. I can’t tip you now in bitcoin. Yeah, I mean… But that’s, you know, that’s then the part when you see that people, they get in contact with it, they feel it’s nice. But then they don’t really pay attention. Yeah, I mean, it happens often. It happens very often when you onboard people as a one-self. Yeah, yeah. And I’ve seen that before and I try to avoid doing that as far as possible. But, you know, people get excited. I mean, this, we had, we had, I think, all in all, we had 80 people here on the trip after the conference. More than the first year. Yes, way more. Yeah, so we had a bunch of people here and it’s understandable that people get excited when they’re in a big group like that. They want to onboard the waitress. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, while we were paying at the hotel restaurant on an ongoing basis, that was great because then the waitresses were actually learning about it because we were going back there again and again over the course of time. But, yeah, it’s one of those. You wouldn’t somebody do something. So, and all the other shops or merchants or pharmacies, I don’t know whatever, who are onboarded, these are places where you go regularly or where the people from the community go regularly. Yeah, not so much where I go regularly, myself personally, but where the people who work for the organization go regularly. And how’s it with the merchants? I mean, Nusihle, I met her last year. She was looking very happy about the fact that she’s holding bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she was stacking sats throughout the entire bear market. She started accepting bitcoin in 2021. Yeah, that’s true. She started accepting bitcoin before the all-time high at the end of 2021. Oh. So she watched the price. She has two all-time highs now already. She’s seen two new all-time highs. Yeah, this is her second. So she’s been through one entire cycle almost. Almost. Yeah. But that’s great because she now knows everything. I mean, she knows you stack sats during the bear market and you wait. Yeah. And you plan your finances in a great way. Because that’s what I had the realization today in a way. Because, again, a lot of people, because I posted yesterday that I spent bitcoin at PicknPay. And you know, wherever I do that, you have those guys who write to you, you’re silly, you should hodl. I will never spend my bitcoin and things like that. And I’m just saying, well, yes, if you hold your bitcoin and you don’t spend it, you’re a passive user of Bitcoin. You’re waiting for the price to go up. That’s all you do. But if you earn it, you spend it and you save the rest, then you learn about the volatility of Bitcoin. You get financially clever. And you are an active part of adoption and building awareness around it because you go somewhere and pay with it and people are looking and more like the more merchants, when they see, OK, people value that, then they will adopt it more. Yeah. So is this something that you’re also seeing in your community that the merchants are getting into it? Because I feel often it’s like merchants, if you’re on board them and then one or two times a month, someone’s coming to pay with it, they are just like, OK, I give it up. It’s because it’s a lot of work, extra administrative work for bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, we try not to onboard shops where it’s a once off. But that has happened. That has happened. Sometimes when we employ a new person, they would get so excited that they would go and onboard people and then it’s like, well, how often are you going to spend your sats? That’s what you should be asking yourself. So we try not to do that. But it has happened. And it’s kind of inevitable that it’s going to happen from time to time. So but as far as the shops in the township community itself is concerned, the only time that we’ve lost the shop that had previously been onboarded is generally when the shop closes down or when they change ownership. We haven’t really had shops in the township saying, no, we’re not going to accept this anymore. In very, very few cases, but it’s the vast majority of people once we onboard them, they kind of stay onboard because they have that regular flow of sats. That’s interesting. And how is the technical infrastructure set up? Does each merchant self custody? Very basic. Explain, please. It’s mostly custodial lighting wallets like Blink. And then for the merchants who end up saving itself, custody of hardware wallets. Oh, OK. So you don’t have a set up like in Witsand. I think they have a note for the whole community and. No, not yet. We do have a, we just finished it. We built a self hosted BTC Pay server note that we will be using first of all to pay the kids rewards with the cards that we do. And we might eventually use that also to onboard merchants on to our own BTC Pay server instance. But generally the set up with Blink just works the easiest because you know. So every person has their own Blink wallet or a hardware wallet if they have more on chain. And you teach them it seems also how to swap lightning to on chain. Yeah, we do. And also all the methods where you can pay with it, right? Because there are a lot in South Africa. Can you tell us about that? What can you pay here in bitcoin? There’s a lot of things that you can use bitcoin to pay for. I mean the merchant doesn’t receive bitcoin. I know. But you can spend it. You can spend it. You can pay being the most obvious example. That, I mean, that story to me is still very much underappreciated globally. I think a lot of people, I mean, I don’t know of another country where that type of adoption story has happened. No, I don’t know any supermarket. 1,600 locations all around the country. It’s big. It’s a lot. You can almost live off of bitcoin just from shopping at the campaign. That’s true. Yeah, exactly. They’ve got clothing stores. They’ve got grocery stores. They’ve got hardware stores. And you can even pay for flights. I mean, only the flight to Johannesburg right now. Local flights. Local flights, yeah. And you also can pay for electricity tokens. Yeah, you can buy electricity. You can pay your water bowl. You can pay your rates and taxes there. Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty amazing. That’s the big one. Obviously, Bitrefill, we use that as well. I’m interested in the petrol, but it looks a little bit complicated on the Bitrefill website. It works really well if you go to the same petrol station again and again. So if you have your local petrol station and then the people there learn to know how to do it, so we’ve got two petrol stations here. One is just outside Mossel Bay, heading towards Cape Town. And one is just outside the town next to Mossel Bay, which is Kleinberg, which is near where I live. And by now, the people there have been trained to know how to go through the process. Yeah, so you buy a voucher on Bitrefill and then you go there with the voucher. But you can buy the voucher in the store and you can buy the voucher for the exact amount that you need. Oh, that’s good. In store? Well, I mean, while you’re in the store. You go there with your phone, you have like, say, I don’t know, 300 rand, just a random amount. And then you buy it online on your phone, the voucher, exactly for the 300 rand. And oh, that’s good because otherwise you always have something open on the voucher. Yeah, that would be annoying. So you would then, let’s say, you know, 325 rand and 67 cents because it’s never really, I mean, you can make it, but if it’s an odd amount, you can buy it for that odd amount. That’s good. That’s really useful. I mean, Bitrefill has done a really great job in South Africa, onboarding a lot of different places. You can get very far just with Bitrefill. Really far. So that’s kind of cool. And I mean, I do almost all my fuel purchases that way. And so, I mean, we have more than one vehicle now. So we purchase most of the fuel for the organization that way too. And it saves you the hassle to exchange the bitcoin you’d get from donations into South African rand, which costs a lot and is a hassle. And it’s great for demonstration purposes too. Like if we have people visiting who are not into Bitcoin, but maybe they’re here to see the surf program, and they’re driving with one of our coaches, and the coach goes to fill up with petrol at the petrol station. That’s a great demonstration of how far we’ve come. I know it’s not the ideal way to spend bitcoin, and we also do prioritize spending bitcoin, where it’s a purely Bitcoin transaction for goods and services. And so the example of buying bread and milk at the spouser shop in the township, that would be that. The second priority is always Bitcoin Pay and Bitrefill, because that’s not a purely Bitcoin transaction. In the background, there’s a lot of fiat shenanigans going on there. But still, great for demonstration purposes, especially the Bitcoin Pay thing, because the Bitcoin Pay thing is so smooth. With Bitrefill, it’s not that smooth, because you have to first buy the voucher, and then the people in the shop at the counter need to know how to clear the payment on their side with that voucher. And that’s not always. And also, I’ve almost never experienced the Bitcoin Pay Bitcoin payment system fail. Like I’ve had maybe one… Not the system doesn’t fail, but I was in a Bitcoin Pay in Simon’s town, and they didn’t have good internet connection there. So I couldn’t prove that. That’s a problem sometimes. But I’ve almost never had the system itself fail, whereas with the Bitrefill system, because there’s so many partners involved. There’s two or three partners involved in making that gift card purchase happen. That if one of them is offline or one of them has issues, it happens about not often, but far more often than what is ideal. Like 5-10% of the times when I go to pay for fuel, I’m like, no, sorry, we can’t purchase the payment this way. Not the majority of the cases. I mean, 5-10%, maybe even less than that, maybe just 5%. But it happens often enough that I can remember the times where it has happened. I’m not confident about that. Speaking of the awareness that you’ve been building around Bitcoin Ekasi, on the one side, have you seen people who live in the township and they are not merchants? Have you seen them coming to you or to the center, to Luthando? How has this changed? I mean, I assume during the bear market, there was low interest? No, during the bear market, there was nothing. But as soon as we started going into a bull market, we had. But it’s not only the bull market. I mean, I think it’s also just sort of awareness, general awareness. So it happened for the first time maybe seven, eight months ago, where I was sitting up at the Ekasi Center and we were having a meeting. Somebody just walked in and asked one of the coaches that we were meeting with, ah, can I buy some bitcoin today? And I’m like, what the fuck’s going on here? And they were like, no, no, this person has been coming here quite regularly. And so she’s just been exchanging small amounts of fiat. A woman. A woman, yeah. And I was like, wow, this is that’s interesting. She’s got nothing to do with the project, nothing. But we have lots of things that we do that are specifically geared towards encouraging that type of thing. So one of the things we’ll go up there and we’ll show you what we’re doing. But we have what we call the thrift shop where we get donated clothes. And we’ve been getting donated clothes for many years. We were quite a well-established charity with a certificate. And so people know about us in the local community. And we often get boxes of clothes dropped off. Same as people often stop in and just donate food. But what we do with the clothes then is we sell them at the Kasi Center for very, very small amounts of sats. But in order to buy those clothes, you have to come in with a two-rand or a five-rand coin, change that to sats, and then make the purchase with sats. And that makes people aware of this thing called the coin. We also price the clothes in sats, which means that the price goes down over time. So if a pair of pants is five-rand, a year ago that would have been a couple of hundred sats. And the price in sats now is half of what it was a year ago. It’s still five-rand. So that kind of shows people, hey, there’s something interesting going on here with this Bitcoin thing. So those kinds of things, we do lots of community, not lots, but we try to do it at least once a month. We do movie nights where we try and encourage people to learn about it and become aware of it. Sasa has been great with that. She’s very well respected in the community. She used to be a primary school teacher. So she’s teaching the Bitcoin Diploma program now. Yeah, she’s teaching the Bitcoin Diploma program now. And she’s also involved with those community events. People have a lot of respect for formal teachers. And she taught at the primary school for many years. So those kinds of things, it helps to get people interested and come and ask and learn about it. That’s the main reason for the center really. And it’s great that you located it up there because, yeah, awareness is being built. And this lady who came in to exchange these small amounts of bitcoin, I’m sure she’s telling her family or the next person, you know? And so it grows, but it’s slow, right? New travels. New travels, yeah. Sometimes fast, sometimes it takes its time, hey? Sometimes it takes its time. Sometimes it happens faster than you’d imagine. What would you say are the most important building blocks for such a circular economy? I mean, one is perseverance, I believe. One is that the person who starts it needs to be very talented in explaining Bitcoin and also a people’s person in a way, I believe. You need to attract donors. So it’s a complicated job in a way. What would you say? I guess so. If we have listeners who want to start a circular economy? I think the most important building block from my perspective is to have a platform that is already established so that you don’t have to build that from scratch. So we had the charity organization and we could build off of that. But it could be anything else. I mean, it could be a business. It could be a church. It could be a club, sports club. It could be anything. But if you have that established platform, you can then add Bitcoin onto that. Whereas it’s really hard to start the platform and add Bitcoin onto a newly established platform at the same time. You need the community first or a business where you can pay people in bitcoin. Because what you want to do is you want to find a way to get sats into the hands of people before you worry about onboarding places where you can spend it. So if you don’t have a business or an organization or a club or something where there’s already an existing structure that moves funds around for its daily operations. If you don’t have anything like that, it’s really hard to figure out, okay, so I’ve onboarded a couple of merchants now, but how am I going to convince other people who are going to spend their money there? And first exchange their money for bitcoin before they’re going to spend it there. That’s hard. But if I can make sure that I get sats into the hands of people by paying salaries or maybe some sort of club membership structure or something, then people have sats to go and spend. And then they will naturally go and spend it at the shops where they accept sats as payment. What has been the biggest learning for you in that journey? My biggest lesson has been to understand. So look, I used to run this charity organization from 2010 to 2020. And in 2020, basically, I was at a point where I was ready to give it up. And I did have a conversation with two other surfing charities in South Africa during the COVID lockdowns where I told them, look, I can’t do this anymore. We have the structure. We have everything. You guys can just come in and take over. And both of them said no. After that, I decided to then turn this into a Bitcoin project. And the biggest lesson through that was that for the 10 years leading up to Bitcoin ECRC, I wasn’t really doing what I thought I was doing. I thought I was running a charity to improve people’s lives. But what I was really doing was learning to be in the position where I am today. So I was learning the hard lessons of how do you build trust in donors that you’re not going to waste their money? How do you build that relationship with a donor? How do you run an operation efficiently and keep it lean, not to waste donor funds on things that are not good? That might be nice, but not really necessary. You can run this operation with a budget that’s twice as big as what it is now, if you just go and outsource everything. Of course. You can always spend more money. Exactly. And I think that’s why a lot of people have this negative feeling towards charities and nonprofits in general, is because a lot of it ends up not being spent on the thing that you’ve donated the money for. The charity will use a picture of a hungry child to get you to donate money, but then the money doesn’t go to feed the child that goes to pay the accountant or the lawyer or the car. Or whatever. So that was a big lesson for me. It’s also very important to learn, those 10 years taught me how do you change a person’s life? Because I thought the way that you change a person’s life was just to offer them help. And it’s not that easy. You can offer somebody help, and they can often take it. But they’re not accepting the help because they really want to improve their lives. They’re accepting the help because it looks like an easy way out for them. And then that becomes a worse situation than what it was before because you create a form of dependency. Where what you really want to do, you want to offer help to someone, but you want to offer it on the condition that it’s used in a way that they actually, in the process of getting help from you, learn to help themselves. So it’s that old saying of give a man a fish feed him for a day, teach him how to fish feed him for a lifetime. It’s a very simple and straightforward saying, but in practice it’s quite hard how to do that because you have to draw the line somewhere. So just to give you a practical example, so we feed the kids every day here. And if we don’t feed them, then they won’t come. Because how can you expect a child to come and learn surfing if they come on a hungry stomach and they leave on a hungry stomach? Even if they want to learn surfing, they’ll probably stay at home rather because they know they’re going to go home hungrier than what they came here. So you have to feed the kids. But now you have to make sure that you don’t get kids who come here only for the food. Yeah, I know. So it’s a very delicate balance. You want to make sure that you feed the kids who really want to learn surfing. But sometimes you’ve got to make that hard choice of identifying the ones that are coming here just for the food and say, no, sorry, this is not for you. And that takes that. That that that that that sometimes that that’s hard. That’s hard to look at a child and say, no, sorry, you’re gone. And sometimes I have to do that with other aspects of the program. It’s like, no, sorry, we as much as I want to help you. You know, just just draw the line. Yeah, it’s very hard to do that sometimes. What was your biggest mistake you feel like with the program? Or failure, something like that? Where also people can learn from, maybe. There’s the risk. And at some point, at some point, we were getting close to making that mistake. I don’t think we I don’t think we fully made that mistake. But there was we became very close to growing too quickly. With this kind of thing, you want to take it slow. And the amount of attention. Or the amount of traction that you get online is not an indicator of the progress that you make in real life. And the temptation is always there to make it look like a lot of things are happening, because that’s how you draw attention to what you’re doing. And you have to draw attention to what you’re doing, because that’s how you attract donations and funding. But that’s going to catch up with you if you’re not careful. So you want to place the priority on. You want to prioritize. The real world growth and progress on the ground. And then showcase that online or whatever the case may be through through no fault of our own, it kind of started feeling at some point like, hey, well, hang on, maybe we should actually just like make it clearer that like progress is slow. So don’t expect don’t expect like the whole township, the whole of South Africa or whatever to all of a sudden be expectations are high then from outside. Because when you see on Twitter or on Oster, people paying here with bitcoin, then people often believe it’s everywhere and everyone’s adopting Bitcoin and we’re winning. Yeah. And I at some point, I mean, at some point, I guess I really did make that mistake of getting pulled into this online world of alternative reality. It’s not it’s not an accurate reflection of what as useful as it is, it’s not an accurate, it’s not 100% accurate, obviously. Yeah. But but people seem to forget that like people seem to forget that what’s happening online is not it’s not it’s not always real. So yeah, try and just just try and remain grounded, so to speak, is probably and that’s an easy mistake to make. I feel also towards your donors, you know, like they come here and have maybe expectations because online there was a lot of talk about how great adoption here is and then I mean, I have to say from my perspective, that option is great because three years ago you had like five shops on board and now you telling me it’s 35. Yeah. I feel that’s a lot, especially when they stick to it and they don’t stop again and they have regular business coming around. That’s a huge growth, I believe. I mean, it’s seven times more like three years ago. I think there’s huge progress, but it’s not it’s not what people expect when you say huge progress. When you say huge progress, people expect it to be 100 or 200 shops and you can buy everything at Bitcoin and you can come to Mossel Bay and everything is just like it’s just Bitcoin. I’m like, well, no, because we’re focused on a small part of Mossel Bay. Mossel Bay is not even a big city, but it’s 150,000 people. There’s no way that you’re going to build a circular economy that involves 150,000 people. Not in 10 years, maybe in 10 years. That’s actually what kind of that actually, and I think that’s why it worked really well in Alzontes because the entire town of El Zonte, only like five, six thousand people. So you can actually go there and feel like you’re inside a circular economy. When you come to Mossel Bay, you have to go not into Mossel Bay, you’ve got to go to into the township that’s within Mossel Bay to feel like you’re inside a circular economy. And sometimes people come to Mossel Bay and they expect this whole place to be like, so people would ask, but why can’t I pay at all the restaurants? And I go because we’re not on putting all the restaurants. We’re focused on that part of the town. Yeah, it’s much slower than people think. It is, but for me, the huge progress is, for example, I look at smaller, more granular examples. Like for example, one of the businesses that we have in Gordon, I say business because it’s very informal, like everything up there in the township is a dude that washes cars. He’s business school, why a car wash? He was at the conference. He came, he came with our team. And about a year and a half ago, he started realizing that so we’ve got, I think we’ve got four vehicles that we wash maybe once every second week with him. And a car wash is what, like a hundred grand. So every second week, there’s like 400 grand that he gets in Bitcoin. And about a year and a half ago, he realized, well, that’s not enough. I got one. So he’s actually buying Bitcoin. So there’s a person who runs a business and this is his full time business. Like he that’s what he does. He washes cars at his at his house in the township. That’s all he does. Like there’s a business in the township that’s actually buying Bitcoin and he’s doing it peer to peer the way it’s meant to be. You know, other people from the township come and wash their cars at his place. He gets cash from them. He comes to our coaches and says, hey, who’s going to sell me sats? And that to me is what huge progress looks like. But it’s granular. It’s not like it’s not about having on board a hundred different people within one person after the other. Like you said before, the lady who came to exchange a small amount. Now the guy who’s washing the cars, our car needs a wash, by the way. He takes very long, though. Oh, OK. That one might not work out then. He takes very long. What’s the plan for Bitcoin? It has he for this year, 2025 into going into 2026. So when we started the project, I mean, you guys were here in May 2022. So it was very, very early on. We’d only really been going for about six months. No, no, eight months. And I think you haven’t been to a single conference back then. Had you? Yeah. No, no. And we’ve been going for about seven, eight, eight months by then. But even even that early on, we knew that we needed a support center in the township. I mean, very early on within the first month or two, I realized, OK, like if you’re going to onboard shops to accept Bitcoin’s payment and eventually you want not just the shops, you want any random person from this community to be able to to get on board, you’re going to need a physical location that is that is that is up there in the township. This location where we are now is not good enough because it’s it takes 20 minutes to walk down here. And it’s only a kilometer and a half away. But if you walk. But it’s a different world, you know, like we here next to a big fancy hotel where, you know, the price per room per night is more than what most people earn in a month. So it’s two different worlds. So you need to you need to have a support center in that world where people feel comfortable to come in. And so that’s what we’ve been working on that for the last year. And we have a center up there, but it’s a temporary one. We are working towards establishing a permanent location up there. We’ve identified a great piece of land and it’s we’ve had plans drawn up. We quite far in the application phase, but it’s been a bureaucratic nightmare because we’re dealing with local government. So the bureaucracy is, you know, in this part of South Africa, there’s not a lot of corruption at the local government level. So everything happens by the book. But that’s sometimes very frustrating because it means that you really have to follow all the all the little rules and regulations that there’s a lot of them. But the upside would be that you could get the property for a small amount, right? Smaller than if you buy from a private investor. Hopefully we get the property for a token price, like which basically nothing. That would be great. Yeah. But a lot of work is running into it to make it happen. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of work is running into it to make it happen. But once we make it happen, I think it’s going to be a fantastic location. I think there’s a I think there’s a couple of things that came together with the success of this project. One of them was the fact that we had this preexisting platform, which is a charity. And the other thing that’s really important is that if you have that, sorry, just a side note, but if you have that preexisting platform, you also need the person who runs that thing to be a bit corner. Of course. You cannot like you also can’t go. OK, you like, OK, I work for this business. But if you’re not the owner of the business, you’re going to have to first orange pull the owner. And that takes years. You never really on board someone to be a bit coiner within a matter of weeks or months, like to really understand the significance of why we’re doing what we’re doing. You need years in bitcoin to really. And you need to have that understanding because without it, you can’t battle through all the things you have before you, you know, like all the challenges. If you don’t know why you’re doing it and why bitcoin is such a great tool, then you will lose your power and perseverance and you will stop because you don’t feel it’s worth it. No, absolutely. You won’t be you won’t be driving the adoption of Bitcoin for the right reasons. I mean, at the end of the day, there’s only one reason in that separation of money and state. That’s what it comes down to for me. Like, yeah, yeah, there it’s some people don’t really understand this, but a Bitcoiner would understand this. It’s like the positive social benefits that this project has on the ground is actually of secondary importance. We are helping people in that community. We are helping this nonprofit. This charity organization is doing better than it’s ever done before. We can help more kids learn surfing. We can employ more people. We are helping people in the township to save money in a way that they’ve never been able to before. That’s changing lives. But all of that is actually secondary because the real and most important thing that we are working towards here is the separation of money and state. And if you don’t understand that, probably you won’t go through all the effort to make this happen. You got to understand that there’s a bigger mission at the end of the day. I might add the separation of money and the state and freedom from financial oppression through that system. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but because that’s why there’s financial repression. There’s financial repression because government, authoritarian governments, bad governments control money. You know, it’s like so all the positive benefits of Bitcoin can have comes from that separation of money and state. Because if you separate money and state, you cannot surveil people anymore. Not as easily anyway, it becomes more difficult. I mean, we are going into a rabbit hole here now because we are speaking about the separation of money and state. And that is how we understand Bitcoin. And then on the other hand, you have a lot of Bitcoiners who say a strategic Bitcoin reserve for the US government, for the South African government, for all the governments. But this is actually not why we are here or why Bitcoin came into this world. I see one benefit to a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And that is that more people will know about Bitcoin. That’s true. Yeah. That’s why we had the conversation at the time. Not because I actually think it’s going to happen and not because I think it’s actually going to benefit people. It’s probably going to just cause more corruption. You know, now they can not only steal rams, they can steal Bitcoin as well. Exactly. It’s just doing the same all over again. Yeah. But more people will have that. More people will learn about it. More people will, you know, hear about it. But just to just to finish that earlier thought of the support center, we are we are really nearing the the point where we have a final go ahead. And that’s really been the long term, long term goal is to have a support center in the in the township community because it’s the it’s the preexisting platform of the charity NPO and the fact that the person who ran that thing was myself was a bit going to be for hand those two things. But then other thing that really contributed a lot to the success of this particular project, I think is the location we have. Because if you go up there, you’re like you’re standing up there and it’s this incredible view is like you cannot almost believe that a township with this level of poverty ended up with a view like that. It’s kind of like it’s hard to believe. Yeah. And that that I think helped more than people realize. And that’s kind of like that’s not something that we could have planned for. It just sort of happened. You’re not in the middle of Kaya Elitsha. No, thousands of shacks around you. No, it’s going to be harder to to draw that. So the reason I mention that is because if we build that support center there, it can become something bigger than just that. A community point where people meet and not only that, but like a focal point for adoption in the wider scheme of things. Like you can you can turn it like the example I always refer to is Bitcoin Park in Nashville. So the HRF has this event that they do in Bitcoin Park in Nashville, but it’s not an HRF venue. It’s a Bitcoin venue. Like there’s lots of events there, but HRF also does their event there. And if we can use that to create something like this to bring in people from abroad, from South Africa, of course, mostly from South Africa to attract people from all over South Africa and then they go back to where they come from and work on adoption there. But you’re attracting them here, not only because of the success of the project, but because people will look at that center with that view and go, I really want to I don’t never mind Bitcoin. I want to see what that looks like because that looks kind of interesting. I understand. Yeah, it’s like when people advertise their homes on Airbnb, you always try and put the best photograph on there. So that’s kind of what we can do with that. You can utilize the view for the sake of driving Bitcoin adoption. We have that advantage. So how can people support the Bitcoin Ekasi project? Come and visit. Come and visit or donate, I assume. Or donate, yes. So where can people donate? The website is support.bitcoinekasi.com. OK, so that’s the donation page. Yeah, that’s the donation page that links back to our normal website where you can read the whole story and everything. Super. Anything else you want to tell anything new that no one knows yet or anything? I mean, on the support page, it tells you that depending on how much you donate, if you want to, we are going to be, you know, putting up names on the walls of the new center, depending on how much you donate. You get a bigger space for your name until you get to the point where we will give you a whole wall. So, yeah, we’ve seen a little bit of interest in that. And I think it’s kind of cool. So we would like to try and get as many small donations as possible. So you can get your name on that wall for us little. There’s 10,000 sats, I think. It’s the starting point. So if you donate 10,000 sats or more, we’ll give you a little space on the wall. OK, and if you want a wall space that has a view to the sea. The entire wall. That’s a little bit more. But all the details are on there. OK, yeah. So then donate to Bitcoin Ekasi. It’s a great project. Visit it two times, looking forward to 2028. I think the next time you come back should be when we are done with the first phase of that center. Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah, then we can then we can do this up there. And are you already planning a next adopting Bitcoin Cape Town conference? Again, in January, yeah, 30th and 31st of January. Oh, you already know. OK, 30-31 of January 2026. Come to Cape Town to the adopting Bitcoin conference. Great place to learn a lot about Bitcoin. And adoption in South Africa. Yeah, yeah, I think it’s I think it’s a great conference. It’s a very exciting project. I’m so happy, grateful to be involved with it. And it’s an interesting conversation that’s happening in South Africa around Bitcoin. It’s interesting, interesting place to see adoption. I have the feeling it’s like also like you had Helen Zilla, who I think she was the mayor of Cape Town. Helen Zilla was the mayor of Cape Town and the Premier of the Western Cape. Oh, why? And the leader of the formal opposition, which is the DA. And she’s now on the federal exec. She’s the chairman of the Federal Executive Council of the DA. So she’s very, very high up. And she was speaking at the conference and also someone from the other party, right? From the Conto Vecis, right? I don’t know. I have to. It’s just a feeling from an outsider, you know, like that. It’s not a total no go here to speak about Bitcoin. Not at all. No, not at all. I mean, in Europe, for instance, in Austria or in Germany, it’s mostly a no go. Like they only talk about how to text it. There’s no talk about how we could share knowledge with people about it or something like that. Yeah. I mean, I think I think the politicians that we had at the conference were for the most part were still pretty clueless. Yeah. I mean, the talk by Helen Zilla, it started off good. But then she talked about and I don’t know, was it a joke or was it real that she’s also investing in other coins? Like she’s gambling, basically. I don’t know if it was a real or a joke. But I mean, for me, for me, the most important part, I don’t know if you want this part of your video, but me, the most important part was to have Helen Zilla and the person from MK watch Luthando’s talk. And so I strategically positioned the Tando’s talk on the schedule conference so that I knew that Helen had to be there to watch that. And it’s a little seat that gets stuck in her mind. It’s because I think the reality is that the vast majority of people, including these politicians, don’t really know what’s going on with Bitcoin adoption. No, I think she realized after the talk or during the talk of Luthando that real people are using this thing that she’s only holding on Luno to pay with things for it and earn it and make a living. Yeah. And it’s I mean, it’s so my favorite part of the talk was actually when because Luthando in his talk, he was talking about he mentioned that he thinks you have a good idea for people who receive government grants to convert that to Bitcoin. And then Helen Zilla came on and she’s like, No, that’s a horrible idea because Bitcoin is volatile. And I like that demonstrates the point because what you don’t know, and this is one of many things that you don’t know, as a high level person looking down and not really having the on the ground experience with Bitcoin, not with other stuff. I mean, I’m sure with other stuff, she’s very in touch with what’s happening on the ground, but with Bitcoin is that the wallet that we pay our coaches salaries into has a stable set feature where you basically cancel out the volatility of Bitcoin. So why exactly would you tell people who receive social grants not to convert their grants to Bitcoin if it’s done in a way where they are being assisted through education, through people like Luthando who’s holding their hand through the whole process? I think it’s actually a great idea. They’re getting the social grant from the government, converted to bitcoin, put it in a wallet like Blink, use stable sets of volatility. If they want, yeah, if they want. And I am powered because they can make usage of the money and decide what they want to do with it on their own. Yeah, yeah. And all of a sudden you’re all of all of a sudden you’re now giving them this tool that can do so much more. Yeah, you’re only giving them five on a grand worth per month. But it’s a paradigm shift because now they’re connected to a global network in a way that they’ve never been connected to before. So why would you not want to do that? But the only reason you would tell people you think it’s a bad idea is because you don’t actually know how Blink works. And Blink is one of the most. How can I put it? One of the most useful adoption tools out there because it’s and you know, you also have more wallets now like Fedi also has a stable sat feature. Yeah. And it’s just there’s more and more of them. And hopefully one day you can do that in a way that is not custodial. I know for the moment it’s custodial. But the point is that the point is that this is what’s happening on the ground. Yeah. And you’re not going to know that if all you’re doing is gambling on shitcoins to you know, like you’re going to have a completely distorted view of what this Bitcoin thing really is. But that’s the view of the majority of the people who are not using bitcoin. Yeah. And that’s just yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly why I wanted them there. Yeah. Both her and the M.K. Politician. But actually I was a lot more impressed by the talk from the M.K. Politician because it was interesting. He came in with a little bit of humility and he started his talk. His name is Ms. Juanelle. He started his talk by saying that look, I don’t actually know Bitcoin or understand it as much as the people in this room. But I’m going to talk about it the way I understand it. And he wasn’t there to lecture us on Bitcoin. He was there to kind of like even in his talk, it was clear that he’s actually there to learn. And he sat. He sat and watched 70 percent of the talks at that main stage. Helen Ziller came in and she watched Lutando’s talk and then she did her talk and she left. He came in and he’s also a high ranking politician in one of the biggest political parties in the country. He came in and he sat and watched 50, 60, 70 percent of all the talks, including Luthando’s school. So that’s really cool. That’s nice. And hopefully you can get the message out to more people in that way. Hopefully, I don’t know. Yeah. No, I think you did a great job programming sessions in that sense. Yeah, we’ll see. Hopefully they come back next year. And then we’ll see what happens. OK, great. Thank you very much. We’re going to go up to the Ekasi Center in a while. Thanks. Cool. Thank you.
