Patrick Melder explains the plan, March 2022: teach the children first

What this video is

In March 2022 the channel Descubriendo Bitcoin interviewed Patrick Melder, the American who started the project we now call Bitcoin Lago. The conversation runs 44 minutes and is in English. It is one of the earliest recordings of the project, made a few months after it began, so everything below describes March 2022. A lot has changed since.

Copying Bitcoin Beach, with one change

Patrick says the project is modeled on Bitcoin Beach in El Zonte, El Salvador. He knew little about it when the idea first came to him, then realized the same thing could be done in Guatemala. The lesson he took from El Zonte was simple: early efforts there went to adults, and adults rarely rush to adopt a new kind of money. At the lake, he said, the team would teach the children first.

Why the lake

Patrick is a Christian who has done mission work. From 2012 to 2016 his family came to Panajachel every year to run an art camp, since his wife and daughters are artists. When he began to think about how bitcoin could help a community, his mind went back to that place.

Three differences from El Zonte

First, no donor. El Zonte began with an anonymous gift of bitcoin. Here, he said, everything was bootstrapped, with some money raised on Bitcoin Twitter. He taught the children every week by Zoom from Atlanta, with a translator.

Second, a bigger and more varied economy. He described Panajachel as a town of about 18,000 people, with around 300,000 living around the lake and a larger indigenous population in places like Santiago Atitlán. He used the name Panajachel to mean the whole lake.

Third, mining and the environment. Patrick wanted mining to help clean the lake. His idea was to repair the cracked biodigester at the Panajachel wastewater plant, which he said leaks methane, and use the gas to run miners. He estimated the gas could run 17 or 19 of the newer S19 machines. The first machines to arrive were older S9 units, brought as a proof of concept. He suggested the coins could go to a multi-signature municipal wallet, with part of the profit returning to citizens, and said he would never benefit personally. These were plans and estimates, not results.

Wallet, cash out and the merchant pitch

The project chose the Bitcoin Beach wallet, built by the company Galoy, so that everyone would use the same tool. Users have a username, so you can pay without scanning an invoice, and the app has a map of merchants. At that time the balance was shown in dollars, which Patrick saw as a drawback.

Cashing out was the hard part. Some companies charged nine percent or more. As a workaround, the man the project had sent to El Zonte for a week acted as a walk-in ATM, with help from a Guatemalan living in Canada.

To merchants, Patrick said: be your own bank, and avoid card fees of five to eight percent. One small bar restaurant next to a hotel lost Salvadoran visitors who asked if it took bitcoin, so the owner wanted to accept it. He counted about seven merchants that day.

The mayor and the school

Patrick had met the mayor twice. His goal was not an endorsement but to make sure the mayor would not become a roadblock. One miner was meant to run at the town hall.

The school was Centro Educativo Josué in Panajachel, with students aged about 12 to 16 or 18. When he asked whether they preferred the quetzal or bitcoin after talking about scarcity, he said they all raised their hands for bitcoin. Children could also earn bitcoin for service projects, such as picking up plastic bottles.

What to take from it

The goal he stated was economic stability and generational wealth for people around the lake, and a cleaner lake. His ask to visitors was practical: go to the lake communities and ask to pay in bitcoin. Compare it with our timeline. The town hall miner began working on March 25, 2022, and by September the project counted more than 60 places accepting bitcoin.

In their words

The number one lesson was that to create awareness and bitcoin adoption, we had to teach the children first.

Anybody who is into bitcoin should visit the communities around the lake and ask to pay in bitcoin. That's the number one way most people can help.

I want him to at least be tacitly supportive of what we're doing.

That we provide economic stability for Guatemalans, in particular those around the lake, so they can generate generational wealth they may never have had before.

This summary is based on the video's automatic captions. If something is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.