Straight, No Chaser
Understanding Freedom through Money, Technology, Economics and Philosophy
Straight, No Chaser
Bitcoin Ekasi - From Surfboards to Satoshis: How Hermann Vivier Built a Bitcoin Economy in South Africa
The secret to true Bitcoin adoption isn't what you think. Meet Hermann Vivier, whose remarkable journey shows how Bitcoin transforms communities when used as actual money.
Hermann's story begins with Surfer Kids, a decade-long project teaching township children to surf in Mossel Bay, South Africa. When COVID threatened to destroy everything, Bitcoin became not just their lifeline but the foundation for something revolutionary.
"The appearance that Bitcoin Ekasi popped out of the ground like a mushroom overnight is entirely incorrect," Hermann explains. His first Bitcoin revelation came during the 2013 Cyprus banking crisis, but the technology truly clicked when Ukrainian clients, blocked by financial sanctions, successfully paid his surf tourism business in 2015. "I was just sitting there thinking: this is incredible. It's literally halfway around the world, skipping all imaginary borders, bypassing financial sanctions."
Today, Bitcoin Ekasi employs 21 people who receive 100% of their salaries in Bitcoin. Approximately 500 township residents use Bitcoin regularly, with around 150 using it daily. Local shops accept it for everyday purchases, creating a genuine circular economy. The project's iconic Bitcoin-branded Land Cruiser serves as a conversation starter, while painted Bitcoin murals on township shacks provide residents with regular satoshi payments.
What makes this story exceptional is how it challenges assumptions about saving. One minimum wage worker earning roughly $15 daily has been stacking sats for three years, accumulating enough to potentially transform his future. "If he hangs onto it and never sells all of it, his life is going to be meaningfully different," Hermann notes. "Saving ten dollars a week has changed this person's life."
Hermann passionately advocates for spending Bitcoin responsibly: "There's no opportunity cost attached to buying coffee with Bitcoin. Go out there, spend the sats, create more demand for this money." He emphasizes that demonstrating Bitcoin's utility as a medium of exchange is precisely what convinces people of its value as a store of wealth.
Ready to support a project that's changing lives through Bitcoin? Visit supportbitcoinekasi.com to learn more about their work and how you can contribute to this grassroots financial revolution.
https://bitcoinekasi.com/
nostr: bitcoinekasi@primal.net
Links:
www.bitcoinforbusiness.io
X: @gavingre
X: @BTC_4_Biz
Primal: GavinBGreen@primal.net
NOSTR: npub12qv07tpwk8x8fy2uuqczghpappap395npuxvsx8pgksh97pezv7s8r7qta
Welcome everybody to the Straight no Chaser podcast, where we talk about human flourishing through money, technology, economics and philosophy. Today we have an amazing chat with Herman Revere, the man behind Bitcoin, yacasi. Herman's story is really incredible. It's the story of a guy that starts off helping other people and along the way, he discovers Bitcoin and how Bitcoin makes sure that his regular business succeeds where many others, many of his competitors, failed, and he goes on to absolutely build a legacy in his local community, incorporating both his business and Bitcoin. It's such a brilliant story and it is a reminder and a welcome reminder to people that are interested in Bitcoin that Bitcoin is not just a savings technology. It is really money, everyday cash that can be used to pay people and to buy goods and services for yourself.
Speaker 1:And Herman has done it in really the most unlikely way. In, frankly, an informal township settlement on the southern tip of Africa. He is showing how Bitcoin is changing lives. You guys will love this one. Awesome, right, herman? Good morning, welcome to the show. It's nice to have you here. I can see from the hoodie that you're wearing that it is cooler where you are than where I am.
Speaker 2:Just for the record, I'm in from the US, so it's Northern Hemisphere. It's high summer here. You, I guess, are in your hometown. Is that correct? Yeah, how's it man? Yeah, I'm in Mossel Bay, which is about as far south as you can go on the African continent. It's not quite at the southern tip, but for practical purposes it's pretty much there. Yeah, it's getting cooler. It's not summer anymore. It's definitely starting getting into winter, but I mean we're super spoiled with winter getting cooler. It's not summer anymore. It's definitely starting getting into winter, but I mean we're super spoiled with winter. Dude, it's like it's a fantastic season actually, so no complaints.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the South African winter is amazing. I'm actually from Pretoria, is actually my hometown, and I think Pretoria is consistently voted as the city with the best weather in the world. So no matter where you go outside of Pretoria, it's never great, but I think Muscle Bay has got the sea, so probably one up on Pretoria.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an awesome place. I love living here.
Speaker 1:Cool, awesome, well, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you. Thanks, man, I appreciate it Right. So, Herman, you're famous for the Bitcoin Ecclesi project Famous or infamous, I think I'll go with famous, but I did notice. Well, I do know that the Surfer Kids was kind of the precursor to what Bitcoin Ecclesi is today and I wanted to just ask you a bit about that. But maybe, before we chat about surfer kids, just tell me a bit about your background for those who may not. They may have heard of Bitcoin Icassi, they may have heard of you, but what is your background? How did you end up in Muscle Bay with Surfer Kids and, ultimately, bitcoinikasi?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think it's great to start with the Surfer Kids, because I don't actually like the amount of attention that's sometimes thrown onto Bitcoinikasi. And it's not that I don't like the attention thrown onto the project, I like the attention, it's great. But the appearance that Bitcoin Ecclesi popped out of the ground like a mushroom and that we achieved the success that we did overnight or within three years or four years or whatever the case may be, it's entirely incorrect. On the surf kits, which has been in existence for more than a decade prior to the beginning of Bitcoin Ekasi. So the day I started Bitcoin Ekasi, I'd effectively already been doing this, which is community-based work, for the last 10 years. So it was not overnight success, not at all. The Bitcoin addition to the project was a relatively small addition to what we already had in place before that. My personal background I grew up in Cape Town, which is obviously, I would say, the best city in South Africa, but you may disagree, coming from Pretoria.
Speaker 1:I said Pretoria had the best weather in the country. I didn't say it was the best city in the country. Victoria had the best weather in the country.
Speaker 2:I didn't say it was the best city in the country. Yeah, I mean, look, cape Town is an incredible place. I grew up there, on the west coast of Cape Town. It used to be a little small fishing village when I grew up there, but the village where I grew up has now been absorbed into the city. Cape Town has grown exponentially over the years, with all the semigration from the rest of the country to that city uh, been going on for more than a decade. So, um, but yeah, I grew up there, moved, moved to this part of the country because I just got tired of living in a city. Um, you know, there's a lot of people, a lot of cars, a lot of traffic and, um, as great as that is for culture and stuff, I just wanted a slightly more quiet life, so moved out here to muscle bay. Um moved here with my wife.
Speaker 2:We started a business here based in tourism and started the circuit at the same time, and that that that all sort of started off in 2010 as the year of the world cup. Everybody, everybody went to cape town for the world cup. I left cape town because of the world cup, the football cup. Um, I just finished a degree at university, then studying philosophy and literature and, um, so not not from a financial or a technology background at all and, yeah, the business sort of got me into Bitcoin actually the tourism business, because it was the tourism business that forced us to look for alternative payment systems when our clients could no longer pay us.
Speaker 2:This was in 2014, 2015, when the Russian-Ukrainian conflict first broke out, and so we actually had Ukrainian clients then who banked in Russia and wanted to pay for a surf trip, which is the business that we started. It's a surf tour operator and they couldn't pay us. They they were stuck behind sanctions, and I've been reading about bitcoin for about two years by that stage. Like, I got got into it in 2013 thanks to bitcoin magazine and I suggested that they pay us in bitcoin, um, and so it it started off. Start. It started off that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's kind of how I ended up where I am today. The long and the short of it Awesome. So I mean, were you a surfer?
Speaker 1:yourself, I mean you've got this tourism business I tried to be. So you've got this surfing tour, uh surfing tour business that you started and then at the same time, you decided to start surfer kids. I mean, that's a big yeah ask. Most people focus on getting business one off the ground, uh settled, before they start looking at uh side projects or uh something more. On the uh philanthropy side of things. I always struggle with that word. So tell me about Surfer Kids. What was that attraction to you?
Speaker 2:I mean, look, I grew up surfing. So the little village which is now part of Cape Town where I grew up, we lived a stone's throw from the beach. So I grew up surfing. I've been surfing my whole life.
Speaker 2:And when we started the business, there were a couple of things we were thinking. We were thinking, well, how can we make this business unique and how can we give people who travel to South Africa a real South African experience? Because it's super easy to come to South Africa, especially this part of the country, especially Cape Town and the Western Cape, and feel like you're in Europe. And so the idea with the Surfer Kids was well, if we started this nonprofit and look, we wanted to give people an authentic South African experience, but we didn't want to go down the like, you know, the township tourism kind of thing where people get on a bus and drive through a poor area to go and look at people like they're driving through a zoo. It's just so. The idea with the Surfer Kids was, look, if we have this nonprofit that's operating and we can give tourists an experience where they interact with this nonprofit, which we can only really do if we're the people running the nonprofit, it's quite, you know, people running nonprofits can be quite territorial, so you can't just go into any NPO and say, look, I've got a bunch of tourists, can they hang out with your people or whatever. So we kind of knew we had to start our own NPO in order to do that. But it would benefit the business by giving our clients an experience they can't get anywhere else and it kind of worked. I mean it didn't work as expected, but it kind of worked.
Speaker 2:So Pacific Kids kind of started growing on its own and yeah, it was a very small operation for a very long time. I mean it's still relatively small, but by the time COVID nearly destroyed it, we only really had two full-time staff members and I mean COVID nearly killed the surfer kids because we were entirely reliant on funding that came through the tourism industry reliant on funding that came through the tourism industry. And so when COVID lockdowns came, our business got basically mothballed. So we basically packed up the business and put it in storage for two years. Fortunately, we didn't have any debt in the business. Unfortunately, we had been into Bitcoin for more than five years by then and we obviously had Bitcoin on the business balance sheet. People were paying us for surf trips in Bitcoin. So we could survive, the business could survive, and when the tourism industry opened up again, we just kind of picked up where we left off. Unlike many, many other tour operators, we have people working for us today who themselves owned operations that were bigger than ours before COVID. So, yeah, bitcoin saved our business in more ways than one.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, the Surfer Kids was always this kind of like side project to the business, with the idea being that we can give tourists a great experience because people know when something's authentic. You know, and, I think, a lot of tourists. My suspicion is that most tourists want to have authentic experiences. My suspicion is that most tourists want to have authentic experiences Like nobody. Nobody wants to be treated like a tourist, although they all, they are all tourists, but nobody wants to get sold and ripped off as a real like, like, like most tourists.
Speaker 2:Do you know people? People travel to a country to have an authentic experience, and and what more authentic experience can you have other than than you know interacting with? With experience can you have other than interacting with the kind of people that you would otherwise never encounter in your regular tourist itinerary? So the non-profit kind of gave us that we could combine surf lessons between the kids and the NPO and the tourists and they would get to surf with people that they otherwise never would have been able to meet. So it was great and that's kind of what the Surfer Kids where it came from, and that's kind of where it was at in 2020 when the lockdowns hit and that's kind of when everything kind of changed, you know, but that's the background of the Surfer Kids really.
Speaker 1:So just probably a final question on the Surfer Kids. When you left Cape cape town, arrived in mussel bay, uh, was there a community of kids from that area that were surfing that you sort of looked at and thought we could help them, or was this something that you actually introduced into the area?
Speaker 2:no, we, we introduced it. There was, there was nothing. There was an effort prior to us by somebody who is sort of my dad's age, you know, so previous generation who had a similar program for township kids running in in the early 2000s sort of late 90s, early 2000s and one of the coaches who worked for us today actually, uh, learned to surf in that particular program. But that program was dead by the time we got here and it had been dead for for several years. Um, and we also did not start in the same community right away. We we started in another one. So, for the most part I'd say, you know, you know, for for the most part we had to introduce surfing, but we did pick up some of the pieces that were left by the operation that preceded us, although, like I said, by the time we started there was hardly any leftovers from before. We found one person, maybe two people, who still had an interest in surfing from that previous program who ended up working for us as coaches, but the one guy didn't stay long. So there's the one person. So yeah, for the most part we introduced it and we also, like I said, shifted to a different community. We identified a place where we could implement this program without the kids needing to be transported.
Speaker 2:So the part of the township where we operate is very, very close to the beach. The kids walk up and down five days a week and the previous surfing program did not operate in that particular area. So in this particular area we introduced I mean, as you know, the townships in South Africa are quite sprawling, you know, they can be very, very large, like in Mossel Bay. You know it's a town of 150,000 people and at least half of the people live in the township. So, you know, only less than 50%, maybe even less than that, to sort of like normal suburbs. The other half is is typical South African township. So it's a sprawling, sprawling township and, um, I'm not sure why the previous program didn't operate.
Speaker 2:Where we ended up going, um, I think maybe because they looked for the sort of the more how can you put it the more well-established part of the township where things aren't quite as rough, where we operate, it's not only the closest part of the township to the beach, it's also the poorest part of the township. So there's, you know, the highest concentration of shacks, the most poverty and, like I said, you know, know the proximity to the beach. But that's really what, what, what, what? The thing that ensured the long-term success of the surfing. It's why, why we were able to operate for 10 years and why we survived, is because of that proximity to the beach.
Speaker 2:So we never, we never, had to rely on transport, and that's super expensive. You know, that's normally what brings a small startup surfing organization down is the reliance on transport. As long as we could afford the salary of one coach. You know, some months we operated on almost nothing. All we needed to do was make sure we can pay the salary of one coach and the kid can come and surf. You know, um, because there were, there were many, many years where we operated on fumes.
Speaker 1:Man, yeah so I mean I know I said that's the last question I'm going to ask about surfer kids, but I'm changed my mind. I mean this is like an amazing story. So another thing that I mean so you took something that wasn't there surfing and you introduced it into this really, as you say, a poor community. What has been? How have people responded to that? What is the impact on the kids? Is there something beyond surfing that you hope to leave with the kids? Or what has surfing meant in that community?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think you know this idea in Bitcoin of proof of work, where you can't fake a valid hash. It's this fantastic idea that ties the money to the real world. That concept to me. I understood that concept before I came across Bitcoin. I think my experience with that concept came thanks to recovery from drug addiction, where you can't fake, because I'm a recovering addict and if you encounter somebody who has a real problem with addiction, the one thing that you can be absolutely certain of is that they're going to find a way to get high. They will steal, they will lie, they will steal their parents' cutlery to sell for drugs. That's what addicts do you know. And in order to recover from that, in order to find recovery from drug addiction, there's, there's something that you need to unlock. Um, I'm not going to go into the details of that, um, but well, I mean, I can, I don't mind, but. But but the point is that that thing that you unlock that enables you to stop using and live a normal, healthy life where you are sober and doing things that normal people do.
Speaker 2:There's no way to fake that. There's just no way to fake it. You either have it or you don't, and there's not many things like that in life. You know there's a lot of areas in life where you can kind of pretend to have something even though you don't really have it. You know you can lie on your CV. You can pretend to have something even though you don't really have it. You can lie on your CV. You can pretend to have the skills that you have, maybe get away with it for a while, do a job that you shouldn't really be doing, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of areas in life where you can do that. But there's two areas in life that I know of where you can't do that, and that's in the recovery from drug addiction and in Bitcoin. You just can't fake that.
Speaker 2:So this idea of proof of work made sense to me, and I could see how surfing could be a vehicle for that, because you know sport is also very similar. It's very hard to fake your ability in sport. You put someone on a sporting field, you make them run around a track, you give them a ball and say you know you can't fake that. It's just that you either have it or you don't. And so with surfing, the idea was to say look, if you want to live a successful life. There's one way to do it, and that is to commit to changing your life, not asking someone else to do it. You must change your life, you must learn how to do difficult things, you must commit to long-term goals, and and surfing is just a vehicle to do that. Like you know, if I had grown up playing some other sport, that would probably have been that sport.
Speaker 2:But surfing is the thing that I grew up with, and so we kind of used surfing as a as a vehicle to convey that to the kids. Like you know, we'll help you, we'll train you. You know you can go places, you can do things, but you have to commit to learning this thing and there's no way that you can fake it. You're either going to show us that you can learn it or you're not. But you can't say I can do it and then paddle out into the ocean and you almost drown. It's like, okay, well, you obviously didn't learn to do it, so so the idea was to teach this.
Speaker 2:You know, commitment to, to, to long-term, um, commitment to long-term goals, and that's really what determines the, that that's really the difference between a successful person and and someone who's not successful. Successful people make goals and they do whatever it takes to get there, despite challenges or hardships. This idea is very much embedded in the Bitcoin ethos as well. But yeah, we used surfing as a vehicle to teach that. This is kind of what the idea was. The idea was not really to teach the kids surfing. The idea was to teach them the value of that principle. Commit to something, make it happen, and you will one day have a better life. Or sit on your ass, complain about it for the rest of your life and nothing's going to change. It's up to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. I've heard the same thing going to university described in the same way. Actually, all it proves is that you can commit to a three-year or a four-year program and you can get through and get it done. It's almost. What you study is almost irrelevant, obviously, unless you want to be a doctor or a brain surgeon or something where it's very specific. But yeah, I've heard that, so that is amazing. And what has been the highlight of the Surfer Kids program for you in terms of the kids? Has there been sort of a standout moment or someone that has just really taken off? Or maybe there's more than one person that's done it? But I mean what? What would a big highlight be for you on that?
Speaker 2:uh, the highlight was, I guess, surviving to the point where we could use the surfer kids to start. But quinnikasi, the highlight, the highlight for me, I there were other highlights, I'm not going to lie, there has been, you know, this past. Earlier this year in March, we had a little 12-year-old kid that won the provincial championships and I mean it's like a little provincial competition but you know, there's a whole bunch of kids that enter from different parts of the province and there's a lot of kids who come from much better circumstances. But yeah, this little boy one is under 12 division and he was just so stoked, obviously, and it was super cool to see and there's been many moments like that across the year. But really, really, the highlight for me was was to, I guess, personally, to have to have learned, to have learned the lessons. Like it's a very, it was a very valuable learning curve for me.
Speaker 2:I mean, I didn't really know what I was busy with while I was running the surfer kids, but, as it turns out, what I was doing while running the Surfer Kids was learning the things that I needed to learn in order to be able to run the thing that came after it successfully, which is the Bitcoin Akasi project, which has drawn a lot more attention and which has grown much bigger than the Surfer Kids ever was on its own, but would never have been able to exist without the surfer kids.
Speaker 2:Like you know, the thinking of making things work when there's no budget to work with at all, the tenacity to rather don't spend money if it's not necessary. If you can make it work in a cheaper way, then you do that. Just because you have the funding, don't go out there and use it that sort of mentality is really really hard to cultivate if you get a big donation or whatever, and I learned those things the hard way. So, yeah, that was really the highlight to me because it has been a very exciting four years with the Akasi project. But I I I hate to think what it would have been like doing this with without that background, running the surfer kidsfer Kids prior to this. Maybe other people can do that, but I don't think I would have been able to.
Speaker 1:So that is amazing. I've just popped onto the screen Bitcoin Icasi. Now that is an amazing picture. You know everything that you've spoken about now talking about grassroots one coach, months going by with running on fumes, and now this picture pops up.
Speaker 2:Tell me a bit about that that thing doesn't run on fumes Drew.
Speaker 1:No, it turns petrol into fumes.
Speaker 2:And it turns a lot of petrol into fumes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tell me about that picture what's happening there.
Speaker 2:It's a 1994 80 Series Land Cruiser. We bought it it had half a million kilometers on the odometer, so typical Land Cruiser you sells for, still sells for a decent amount after having done, uh, you know, half a million kilometers and after two decades, like it's you know um. But anyway, the the idea, the idea with that was really just to make a statement and draw, draw attention, um, to start a conversation, that that car is basically a conversation starter. You know we've been using it for the past three years to take kids to surfing competitions. One of our coaches does triathlon. He's the guy standing up at the back there. His name is Akona. You know he'll go and do triathlon events. You know He'll go do swimming triathlon events. You know he'll go do swimming, running, cycling events.
Speaker 2:We've taken the kids to skateboarding events with this car. And wherever you go, people, people ask questions and and that's really why, why we built this thing. I mean, I say we built it because we literally spent almost as much money on making it look the way it does as we did on buying the original car. So we bought the vehicle for X amount and then we spent the same amount on the tr and uh, every, just everything to make it look as as cool and as much bitcoin like as possible. But yeah, so the the dude on the right hand side, he's, that's lutando. Uh, he's sitting there next to the horns. Um, he, he was the only coach that was left at the surfer kids um COVID lockdowns after we opened up again after the COVID lockdown. So we had other coaches that worked for the surfer kids going into COVID, but because we had to operate literally on fumes by the end of the two-year lockdown period, he was the only person left. So it's basically him and me that started the Akasi project.
Speaker 2:We sort of I remember the day sitting there with him saying like, look man, this thing is going to die or we can try and do something else with us. So let's take the surfer kids and we turn the Surfer Kids into this other project, and the Surfer Kids will still exist and in fact, it will probably benefit a lot from this, but it's going to become something else. It'll still do what it does, but it'll do way more than what it was doing. The lady in the middle there is a former primary school teacher. She teaches the Bitcoin Diploma, so we've got classes five days a week teaching kids from the same neighborhood where we get the kids from to join the Surfer Kids. So we recruit from the same neighborhood both for the Surfer Kids and for the Bitcoin Diploma classes. We just recruit the children a little older for the Bitcoin diploma classes. With the surfer kids we start from six, seven years old they start coming to surf and with the Bitcoin diploma we start from around 12, 13 years old.
Speaker 1:I mean that's incredible, that's amazing. I mean that's incredible, that's amazing. So let's, I mean that's a great way to start talking about Bitcoin. I've had some clients actually pay me in this to how does that tie together where you go? Hey, this is something that we can actually bring together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'd say there was probably three different aha moments. The first two were personal and then the third one was the sort of bitcoin ikasi aha moment um the. The first two aha moments was when I, I, I was, I was peripherally aware of the banking crisis in Cyprus in 2013,. It came as a result of our involvement in the tourism industry that we heard these stories of people, because, I mean, there were a lot of Russians who banked in Cyprus and we heard these stories of people who had deposits in some of these banks that went bankrupt. I believe it was the three biggest banks in the country that went bankrupt. I mean, this is a European country. This is not some banana republic. This is a European country.
Speaker 2:Three largest banks in the country go under and people had deposits forcibly, forcibly, forcibly confiscated in exchange for shares in these banks, which, at that time, were bankrupt companies. So that's like that's, that's ridiculous. Like you're, you're being forced to buy shares in a bankrupt company so as to bail out the company, like it's. And and I, I, I saw this and I was like I mean, I, I've been aware of the shenanigans in the financial world for for a while. Like 2008 was my, my awakening moment. You know, I, when I, you know, just hearing the numbers being thrown around 700 billion dollars to bail out the system, that basically itself, um, but, but when I, when I heard that, I was like shit, this is really unfair. And then the thing, the thing that really did it for me was, at the same time that I was reading up about the stuff in Cyprus, a friend of me, a friend of mine, gave me a copy of Bitcoin magazine. This was halfway through 2013. I still remember the cover um of of that magazine and and I read this and I was like, if these people had their money in bitcoin, this wouldn't have been possible. Like if I, if I understand this thing correctly, then then this is like pretty much revolutionary, right, because there's just no way that somebody could confiscate your bitcoin if, if this is how it works, and so that was all theoretical. I didn't really know how it worked because I was just reading stuff in a magazine. So that was the first aha moment.
Speaker 2:And then the second aha moment was when I sat, when I sat behind my computer in 2015 and I saw that first payment come in from from, from the ukrainian dudes that paid us for that surf trip in in march, march 2015, I saw that first payment come through and I was like I remember thinking, holy shit, the banks are never going to survive this. Like there's just no competition here. Like I just I just received money from a person like we had tried every other way. Like nothing else there was no. There was no way they could send it through the banking system. We couldn't use something like PayPal. None of that was available. Like we even resorted at some point to try and make a deal using credits on some gambling platform. Like this guy was going to pay me in gambling credits and I could then cash it out this side. And at that point, I told them no, no, no, no, wait, hang on, I know that you don't know about this bitcoin thing because no one knows about it. Um, you know this is 2015, but go and read up about this thing and then I'm pretty sure that you can pay me in this. I'm sure that I'm sure you can find someone that side where you can buy some bitcoin and you can send it to me and and and the transaction came through. 10 minutes later, it had its first confirmation and I was just sitting there thinking like this isn't. This is incredible. Like this is literally halfway around the world, you know, skipping all imaginary borders, borders, bypassing financial sanctions. Nobody knew about it. There was no declaration, there was no paperwork. It was just like here's some cash, I'm going to email it to you. That was a huge aha moment.
Speaker 2:And then fast forward another five years 2020, at the end of 2019, I started following the bitcoin beach story and the moment I heard that first interview with mike peterson, I was like, oh wow, I think I could do that, because I basically have the same setup. Like I have a background in bitcoin. I've by that time, you know it had what? Six years I'd been obsessed with this thing. So I had the background, I had the experience, we'd been using it. It wasn't just theoretical, we were actually using it for payments and stuff. So I had the experience and I had this nonprofit.
Speaker 2:That was the perfect platform to to utilize for something like a Bitcoin beach project, where you, you pay people salaries in Bitcoin and it has these positive knock-on effects. You know where you're motivating people to start thinking about the future, start thinking about saving and basically uplift themselves, because that, at the end of the day, is what we were trying to do with the surfer kids, but it's really, really hard to do that. It's very, it's very like that old saying of you know, give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach him how to fish, feed him for a lifetime. That is really fucking difficult to do. It is very, very, very difficult. If you want to use that analogy, it's very difficult to teach someone how to fish. Um, it's very difficult. It's, it's a very big challenge. It's really easy to feed someone with a fish. Teaching them how to fish is incredibly difficult and in my experience, I didn't really find a way to do that. But once we introduced bitcoin, we did find the way to do that. You but you basically pay someone salary in an asset that appreciates over time, and that's how you get them to think about the future. That's how you get them to plan, to plan for their own future.
Speaker 2:Um, and when I when I heard mike peterson talk, it was funny because the guy interviewing him was peter mccormack. It was funny because the guy interviewing him was Peter McCormack it was the what Bitcoin Did podcast and Peter McCormack was like he was skeptical. He was like nah, dude, this can't work. And I was sitting there going, no, no, no, no, this really can work. I know this could work, I know this could work and I'm going to try it, I'm going to copy this and I'm going to do what they're doing there.
Speaker 2:That was the third aha moment. That was late 2019 through early 2020, because I heard the podcast interview in late 2019 and then I sat with the idea in my head and then when the lockdowns came, I was like, okay, shit, now I kind of have to do something different because the surfer kids are going to die. So it wasn't like an aha moment in one single moment. It was this stage of like, maybe six to nine months, where it went from the initial podcast episode to listening to a follow-up podcast, to reading about the project, checking them out on Twitter and then thinking about the future of our own organization and then finally making the decision of our own organization and then finally making the decision of like, okay, it, let's, let's copy what they did yeah, that reminds me of that old saying.
Speaker 1:I don't think I'm saying it properly, but it's something about you know. Good luck is when preparation and opportunity come together, and it sounds like exactly what happened there. You had this idea bubbling in the back of your mind, uh, over some time. Uh got to mess around with it, check it out, see it worked. Uh, resolve any doubts in your own mind, get that conviction level, and then you know, an opportunity comes up. Uh called covid, uh disaster for some opportunity for others and you have something that is ready to slot in. That is super cool. So so tell me about your very first conversation when you're going to tell somebody that you're going to pay them in bitcoin, and then the very first conversation when you tell a store owner to accept this Bitcoin. I want to hear how that went.
Speaker 2:I mean so my initial conversations, and even today I talk to the coaches and the coaches go out into the community and do the work on the ground. The reason I do it that way is because of the racial and cultural dynamics in South Africa. I don't want to make it look like I'm the person leading the project in the township. I'm fine to be the face of the project looking out to the rest of the world. I'm totally fine with that. But when it's on the ground in the township community, I want the coaches to be the leaders, and so Lutando is is the leader of the project in the township and he's the one that's on board at all the shops in the township. But I do know how the conversations went because I've been. Obviously I talk to him on an almost daily basis. My first conversation with him was basically like, look, I know that you have no. Well, I mean, actually I I was forced to talk to lutando about bitcoin because I he, he almost got got pulled into a bitcoin scam, and so I knew that there was a person who had had this conversation with him and I I approached him afterwards and I said, look, man, like the thing that this guy was talking about bitcoin, like there is this thing, but it's not what he was saying. Like this guy was talking about Bitcoin like there is this thing, but it's not what he was saying. Like this guy was trying to use the name to scam you out of your money. So yeah, in other words, that put me in a position where I had to explain to him what Bitcoin was, because just saying that's not good enough, because I knew if I didn't explain it to him properly, he's probably going to turn around and go right back to that guy, because everybody was desperate at that time. This was COVID People earning half the salaries they would normally earn. Everybody wanted to find a way to make extra money, and so I had to explain it to him properly. And so that was the first conversation. And then I think that helped a lot, because then, when I pitched this idea of you want to earn your salary in Bitcoin, he already had a little bit of an understanding of what I was talking about. That was not the first thing I went to him with. The first thing I went to him with is look, man, I need to explain something to you because you're about to walk into a dangerous situation. Um, so I think that that helped a lot to set to set the groundwork for what followed. And then the conversation for the shop owners. Look, I mean, I think you know what it comes down to is people. People will adopt anything you put in front of them if it solves an immediate problem. Like you know, if you have a real problem right in front of you and I come up to you with a solution, you're not going to have an opinion of that solution, like, you're just going to go. Does this thing solve my problem? Okay, fine, let's go. And that's kind of how it was with the shop owners.
Speaker 2:Like, you can do things with digital money that you can't do with paper money. Like you can do online shopping. Like, one of the most amazing moments, even today, is to demonstrate to somebody who has never had access to digital money how to buy phone credit, or airtime as we call it here. How do you buy airtime from your phone? Like that's like a magical thing. If you've never had digital banking before, like if you've lived your entire life based on cash, you know you always had to walk down to the corner store with physical cash in your hand to go and buy your airtime. Now, all of a sudden, I could put money on your phone. Uh, you don't have to stand in a queue at a bank to open the account and you can just buy your airtime right there and that's that. That's the kind of thing that got the shop owners on board, so lutando's conversation with them was all about that, like practical problems right here, right now.
Speaker 1:Let's solve that, and then you will want to use it, no matter what yeah, that that is, uh, probably the key, I think, to the conversation around bitcoin with anybody is you you have, I mean, you mentioned earlier. You said you know you've been obsessed with this technology ever since and I haven't actually spoken to a single person who's looked into Bitcoin. That isn't saying the same thing. Everybody's absolutely obsessed with it and there's so many different directions you can go in. There's the technological side of it, there's the economic side, there's the philosophical side, and I remember it was something I think Robert Breedlove on his what Is Money show mentioned once that if you click on the first link on a Wikipedia page and just keep clicking through, eventually you end up on a page of philosophy and it's kind of interesting. That's what you studied. Technological side of it is fine and the economic side of it is fine, but the philosophical side of it is, uh is actually the most important one in my experience is I have to understand what this thing does for me and why it does it. Uh, does it solve this real problem? Um, and I think that's where real world, uh issues and philosophy are. They might seem like they're on opposite ends of the spectrum, but it's actually the same thing, because your philosophy kind of determines your worldview, or your worldview determines your philosophy, whichever way you want to look at it, and if you understand what it does for you, like the practicalities, as you've just said.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think a store owner you know they're a business owner, you have your business, I have my business. When someone wants to come and tell you a long-winded story about some you know thing, that's all fine and well, but if they can solve your problem, that's incredible. So I find it amazing that that is what your. You know how Lutando has tackled it. You know, obviously he's a sales genius. Sales 101 is just give the customer what they need. Don't try and sell them something that you want to sell to them. So so now, so he's had conversation with store owners, he's been getting paid in it, and how quickly did this idea sort of spread out or proliferate through your community?
Speaker 2:it happened pretty slowly, but I mean, we kept it.
Speaker 2:We kept it small for as long as necessary. It's grown a lot. So we have 10 people 11 people that we now employ full-time and another 10 people that we employ part-time and all of them earn 100% of their salaries in Bitcoin. And this is just with the charity, with Bitcoin Incase and the surrogates. On the business side of things, we still have the tour operator. There are several more people there that work and earn everything in Bitcoin too. We run about 70% of the business based on Bitcoin, but my wife runs the business for the most part because Akasi keeps me busy full time. Um, but it it happened pretty slowly. You know, it happened over a period of time. I mean, for the first year, it was lutando, and then we got one other person, and then in the second year, we we started growing quite, quite a bit, but again, not not too quickly. Um, and I mean today, you, today, we're at a point where we have some numbers on the donation page, but I think it's like between 400 and I think if you go to supportbitcoinicassicom or if you click on the donate button on the website and you scroll down a bit, there's some numbers, that the best estimates that we have for how many people are using Bitcoin in the Township community on a daily basis, and I think the total number is around 500 people. So it's still not. It's still not massive. Yeah, that's the one. Just scroll down a little bit and you'll see there's some, some numbers. Uh, yeah, a little bit more. Yeah, there we go that one a little bit up. Yeah, so that's, yeah, so it's about. It's about 500 people. Um, so, on a daily basis. You know it gives you the number of people that are using bitcoin on a daily basis. You know it gives you the number of people that are using Bitcoin on a daily basis, weekly basis and then a monthly basis, and then there's like a brief description of what they are using it for. But, yeah, all in all, that's about 500 people either using it daily, weekly or monthly. But even if you just look at the top section, the orange section, you know that's over 100 people, 150 people using Bitcoin on a daily basis, which is still quite small. But that's fine.
Speaker 2:You know you want to be conservative when introducing this, because it's a new technology. You're introducing it in an environment where people oftentimes don't read. Um, you know people oftentimes don't don't understand large numbers. You know just the idea that there's a hundred million satoshis in one bitcoin. You know 90 of the people you go to in the township don't know how many zeros there are in a million, because you're dealing with a lack of education, which is not their fault.
Speaker 2:You know it's it's it's it's the fault of a completely, completely corrupt government system that has failed its people and has failed to implement, um, the policies, uh, that that would actually uplift and empower people.
Speaker 2:But the reality on the ground is that you're dealing with people who and Lutando says this himself you know he says that one of his biggest challenges is explaining that to people and he himself struggled with it for a long time. You know, to understand these difficult theoretical concepts that you sometimes need to understand when you use bitcoin not always, but you know, if you just got a blink wallet and you want to buy, buy something from the local spaza shop, that's fine, but once you start saving in bitcoin and thinking about the future, you do want to start understanding it on on a deeper level, and that's pretty challenging. So, yeah, we keep it conservative. You know we're not going to onboard 150 new people tomorrow, because that means you have to educate 150 people for the next six months to a year and that is a huge commitment. So you can't onboard 100 people per day because you're going to overload yourself with the educational burden.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. I mean, that's how a network grows. It's not one person doing all the work. One person teaches one, that one teaches two, those two teach, you know three or four and you get this network effect and that's why you know, I love what you were saying about people looking to save and people looking to look after themselves.
Speaker 1:And I see you've got this interesting graph which I've just pulled up now once again also on your website. It's under the About tab and it just talks about the loss in purchasing power in the South African Rand, and you've got the two next to each other. The first one is a 98% drop down and I think that was from the 70s to 94. And then from 94 onwards you've got a 97% drop down. So is this a reality that people understand? Is this something you talk to the community about? Or obviously Lutande would talk to them about, about, or obviously Lutande would talk to him about? Like the real world connect between my rands are paying, buying less than they used to buy last year, the year before. Is that a message that the guys are understanding or they're feeling it and not really knowing why?
Speaker 2:it's a message that they, that they don't always understand cognitively, so like they know that things get more expensive every year. But I mean, I've had conversations with highly intelligent people who also struggle to understand why money depreciates over time. It's that old story of you know, when you're a fish swimming in the water, you don't know what the water is, because it's all you know. So, yeah, I think I mean they definitely begin to understand it once they start saving in Bitcoin, because then it just becomes so obvious. But when you show someone this graph it's almost too abstract to explain. Also, because you're talking about you're talking about longer periods of time, like I I can remember over over my lifetime when I was I was born in the mid 80s, so by the early 90s I I could start remembering things, and I remember a liter of petrol costing like two rand or three rand, whereas today it's more than 20 rand.
Speaker 2:You know, I remember the first time I understood the concept of an exchange rate a US dollar was five rand. Today it's 18 rand. So it's kind of shitty, but it's not like overnight shittiness, it's kind of a longer period decline, and so I think it's a little too slow the decline for most people to have an immediate understanding, like it's not Turkey or Argentina or Venezuela or Zimbabwe. It's kind of too slow for people to really understand the problem. But they all face this problem because the South African rand has declined by a huge amount relative to most other currencies, especially the dollar, over the last sort of generation. So it's not an immediate, obvious understanding, if I could put it that way. But the, the coaches like lutando, who's been saving in bitcoin while it's been I mean, he's been stacking sites for three years, and the first shop owner that he on boarded she's also been stacking sats for three years they definitely understand it and that's great, you know.
Speaker 1:So I think my final question to you is what do you say to people that you know poor people can't save or people from low-income areas can't save? There's no ability to save. It might be sounding a bit like the criticisms of the Bitcoin beach. Maybe I'm taking you back to that first podcast you heard talking about that.
Speaker 2:What do you say to that? Well, I mean, I don't. I don't need to say anything to it, because we have real world examples of people who disprove that idea. Like, one of the things that we do, um is, you'll see on the website, there's, there's pictures all over the place of painted shacks. Um, so we've, we've painted shacks with all kinds of different logos. If you go to the, yeah, that that's one of them, for example. Um, so there's, there's 36. There's 36 shacks in the township with logos like that that we painted on them.
Speaker 2:And we do that for a couple of different reasons. But one of the reasons we do that is because you know what you want to do when you build a circular Bitcoin economy is you want to look for ways to get Satoshis into the hands of people so that they can spend it, but you want to find a responsible way to distribute those sets. You don't just want to go out and throw them around. You don't want to come in there like a glitchy cash machine that's just spitting out money. So that's why it's great to find paying salaries in Bitcoin. That's a great way to do it. But this is another way to do it. So we, we, for example, we'll, we'll go to someone, we'll go to someone's shack and we'll say look, we'll paint your shack, it'll make. It'll make the shack look nice. So you know, we give you a nice paint job. It looks better than what it used to look. Um, we get something out of it because we can put whatever logo we want to on there. Normally we put the logo of another project or another company or something, something that we know is going to attract attention when we post it on social media. So it creates that marketing effect for our project and draws a lot of attention to what we do. But then at the same time we can say to the person who lives in the shack look, we'll pay you for this. Like you know, this is kind of like marketing for us. So we'll pay you for this, provided that you look after the painting, it doesn't get vandalized or anything, and that you you clean up the area around your shack. So you've got. You've got to get rid of the pollution, you've got to pick up the plastic rubbish, you've got to make sure that the place doesn't look like real crap. You know, it's got to be, it's got to be as clean as possible and if you do that, we'll pay you in sets. So we've been.
Speaker 2:We've been doing this for three years two and a half, three years and there's one particular individual. There's more than one, but there's one in particular. I mean, this guy lives in a shack. He does have a job, so he is employed, but it's a it's a minimum, minimum wage job. Um, he earns what? 250 around a day. So what's that in dollars? Uh, 10, 10 dollars. Yeah, probably 12 dollars maybe 12 dollars, yeah, there about.
Speaker 2:So let's say, let's say you earn $15 a day between $10 and $15 a day that's basically minimum wage in South Africa. This guy has been saving all the SATs that we've been paying on a weekly basis and so we pay. We pay 6000 sets a week, so when we first started, that was like 6060, a little bit less than that, maybe 3040 around and it's gone. It's gone above 100 Rand now. But we denominated in sets because we want people to grasp this idea of one of these currency units are going down in value, another one is going up and the way you do that is by not denominating the payment in sats, not in ranks, and this most of them spend their sets, but this particular guy has been stacking sets for three years and, man, last time I checked in on this guy, he's sitting on a solid stack, okay, and like that's someone who that's someone who is living in impoverished conditions, who earns minimum wage, and there's an example of somebody that's saved and he has saved enough bitcoin that he's probably changed his future.
Speaker 2:Like that's not an exaggeration to say that he has saved. He has saved an equivalent amount of money that, if I think about where he's going to be in 10 years from now, like his life is going to come, provided that he keeps making the right decisions. Like if he sells that bitcoin in the next bull run, yeah, okay, you know, but if he hangs on to it and he never sells all of it, um, his life is going to be meaningfully different. Um, just because he saved a hundred rands, I mean you could say he saved ten dollars a week. So saving ten dollars a week has changed this person's life and so I don't really have to say anything. I just point to examples like that, and that's just one. That's just one example, but it's it's one example that there's no reason why that can't be replicated. It's just a matter of choice, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's incredible, Herman. That's such an amazing story. Thanks for sharing that. We are pretty much up on time at the moment. Is there anything that you wanted to talk about quickly that we haven't really covered?
Speaker 2:no, I mean, I think that's pretty much it. I think I would just, uh, I would just, I mean the, the ongoing debate, and this is something that I'm kind of gearing, getting ready to discuss when I go to the us at the end of next week for the for the big bitcoin conference. It's like this idea that we can just huddle and, huddle and huddle until bitcoin is fully monetized itself. It's like it's just total rubbish, like you have to spend this thing, man. And it's like I I love discussing this topic because it gets people worked up so much, but it's so simple, it's so basic.
Speaker 2:It's like, dude, there is no opportunity cost attached to buying a coffee with bitcoin. Like, come on, man, you know, just go out there, spend the sats, buy a coffee, create more demand for this money, and that's how you fuel the circular economy and that's how you drive adoption. You know, there's vast areas of the world where you're never going to drive adoption simply by hodling, but where you can drive adoption through responsible spending. And you don't do that in a way which takes away from the saving culture. You do that in a way that actually encourages the saving culture. So it's kind of like a false debate. You know it's like just get over this mentality that everyone must just huddle forever like there is. There is already now a place for spending bitcoin. That that that really helps helps the mission 100 yeah, I know that's well said there.
Speaker 1:Uh, I agree with you 100. Um. You know the whole sort of commodity theory of money, which I think is a very Austrian economic way of viewing money. It makes complete sense to me that when people were discovering what is something that is valuable to somebody else, it was discovered by what is somebody else prepared to accept. And when you are passing this thing around and it's being passed around and everyone is starting to converge hey man, give me more of that stuff, because I know a lot of other people that will accept it.
Speaker 1:Uh, is passing this money around and the more people that accept it and pass it on, it kind of builds. People are then prepared to say I'll save some of the stuff because I know plenty of people now that will accept it. And that comes to that store of value versus medium of exchange. And I don't know if there's a fine line, but if there's a big difference between the two, I think the line is very fine and it's overlapped in many cases and it's just one of those things. And I agree with what you're saying Get the stuff moving out there, get people, people accepting it, because when people accept it you have a bigger market. When you have a bigger market, it becomes something that more people will be prepared to save, it's sort of self-fulfilling prophecy yeah, 100 dude.
Speaker 2:I mean I, I'm, I'm, I'm only one half of this operation. My wife is the other half and I had to convince my wife to to hold on to bitcoin. And it wouldn't have been, it never would have happened if that first transaction that and, and and we we used bitcoin as a medium of exchange there in 2015 to receive value and transfer it over here, and it was the medium of exchange aspect that that got her on board. And she looked at that. She was like, okay, this thing is going to have value one day because look how easily I could transfer value from one side of the planet to the other. It was because we could use it as a medium of exchange that she was happy to get on board with me.
Speaker 2:I understood a little bit more of about the technology and the scarcity and why it would probably pick up value, because people are going to huddle and hoard this thing. But she got on board really because of the ease with which we could use it as a medium of exchange to transfer value from one side of the planet to the other, because she was the one dealing with the clients and getting the clients and getting them to pay. So it's totally true that you onboard people onto the savings technology by showing them how easy it is to spend and how many people are actually willing to take this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that is. I mean, I couldn't have said it better. You obviously are speaking from experience and that comes through in what you're saying, herman. How do people get hold of you? How do they follow you and your projects? How do they just keep in touch with what you're doing?
Speaker 2:I mean, on that website we have a contact form. If you want to get in touch via email, that's the best way to do it, you know. And other than that, we have a profile on Twitter where sometimes I do get around to checking DMs, but for the most part it's a mess. It's just so much spam and bots there that the better way to do it is through their website email form. And I also enjoy Noster, so I post on Noster and I often, often I'm on there. So, yeah, either one of those ways, that's the best way.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, herman. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for giving up this hour of your day. Good luck with your presentation and I look forward to watching that. I will be back in South Africa by the time you are in the US, so I'll watch it online. But have a good one and well done with all the work you're doing. Appreciate it, appreciate it. Thank you, cheers, thanks.
Speaker 2:Cheers, bye.