Context
About 5 months ago I entered the Bitcoin rabbit hole. The Orange Pill was given to me by @Cuba_BTC, thanks to the Fourth Edition of the My First Bitcoin online diploma course, otherwise it would have been impossible for me since I am on an island in the archipelago far from the main island.
After finishing the diploma course I began to talk to some people, including students I was teaching, about Bitcoin and to my surprise one of them called me aside and told me that he was interested in the subject and knew others who might also be interested and so the contacts of my acquaintance and his acquaintances began, a network of acquaintances who were interested in cryptocurrencies began. I discussed it with the founders of CubaBitcoin and they suggested that I could teach a basic course on Bitcoin in my area.
Preparations begin
I started to contact those who were interested in learning about Bitcoin and we created our telegram group and started looking for where to do the course. A place appeared that works as a restaurant business on the weekends and the owner agreed to rent the place for 5 Mondays for 1 and 1/2 hours.
We used the same program as the MFB diploma but in a simplified way. I must point out that most of the presidents had bitter experiences with pyramid scam systems such as TrustInvesting and Roima, the latter a system specifically for Cuba, but they still wanted to learn. And this fact becomes relevant because the participants were still a little worried about the topics that would be discussed, and this background was the same one that prevented other acquaintances of the participants from joining.
The course begins
Our first meeting surprised the participants, we talked about MONEY. The surprise was great in two ways, first they understood what money is and how it works and on the other hand they understood that the fiduciary system is a bigger scam than they imagined. But the most surprising thing is that among the participants were two bank officials, one of them confessed to me "that he has been working in banks for 25 years and had no idea about many of these things", the other told me "that he had knowledge of these things, but he did not understand how cryptocurrencies could be a solution to these problems, because some of the ones I know work like banking systems", he was referring to shitcoins.
The subsequent meetings were more interesting, Layer 1 and 2 of Bitcoin, buying Bitcoin without KYC, the need and viability of implementing a Circular Economy around Bitcoin to solve the problems of ordinary citizens. In these meetings they were able to see in a practical way how Bitcoin works, its security, decentralization and how Lightning solves the problem of the scalability of the ecosystem and how for us it is the best solution for the development of a circular economy. As I had mentioned, many of them came from pyramid scams and understood that Bitcoin is not a scam, it is a real solution and true financial freedom.
The course ends
After 5 weeks of face-to-face meetings and we also incorporated an online meeting every Thursday during those 5 weeks, we reached the end of the course. We did a final exercise where we analyzed most of the points that Bitcoin from a technical, economic and philosophical point of view helped us understand, taking as a basis a tweet from BTCAndres. The exercise took place on December 21st, the participants' families were present and we did it in the place where we had been during the entire course.
That day the participants' families also understood a little about how Bitcoin solves problems, we can count that day as the first meetup of the La IslaBTC community, the first of many to come.
What did we achieve?
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We created an extension of the CubaBitcoin community in a remote place in the archipelago.
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7 people who finished the course took the Orange Pill, another 12 people are already taking the Orange Pill and requesting a new course.
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The business where the meetings were held already accepts Bitcoin as a means of payment. Even at the final meetup of the course we paid for the beers with SAT.
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We found a place where we started to have face-to-face meetings with the graduates and some others for practical exercises on the use of self-custody Lightning wallets. This place will be our Bitcoin center, where we will start meetups for the community and local merchants and upcoming basic courses. It will also be a business where Bitcoin is accepted.
This is the beginning of the journey with Bitcoin for the La IslaBTC community, on a small island in the Caribbean. We trust that we will soon be announcing more businesses that accept Bitcoin and thus we will be building a a true circular economy