Empowering Bitcoin: Grassroots Initiatives For the Win

Grassroots initiatives that are focused on Bitcoin are often under-appreciated in terms of their importance. Not only do they collectively contribute towards setting Bitcoin apart from every other ‘crypto/web3/blockchain’ project there is, they contribute a great deal towards building the resilience of the Bitcoin network.

They are predominantly voluntary, community-driven and bottom up initiatives that are trying to onboard people to the Bitcoin network and can have different goals like educating their local communities, community-building though meet ups, organising conferences, creating study cohorts or building circular economies.

While asked what makes Bitcoin stand apart from thousands of other ‘crypto/web3/blockchain’ projects, we’d all have so many arguments lined up in our heads.

They’d include some version of a long-winded lecture about decentralisation, fair launch, capped and predictable supply, governance, ledger size, security, immutability, bottom-up protocol governance and the fully open source and transparent nature of development.

Which are all very strong arguments and we don’t disagree with any of them. However, we’d argue that the strongest case for Bitcoin being completely different is the existence of all these initiatives that focus just on Bitcoin.

Over the last few months, there’s been many videos popping up on Twitter in which people use Bitcoin to buy real goods and services. The diversity of places that these videos were coming from was astounding, covering 15 different countries and more that we probably don’t know about.

BTC map can paint you a good picture of what we are talking about.

We see this as a direct consequence of these grassroots initiatives, which are focused on bottom-up adoption of Bitcoin as money, with their members educating people in their circles and onboarding them.

These initiatives are also significant because they contribute towards decentralising the economic majority in the network by educating people to start running nodes, take self-custody and accept Bitcoin for goods and services.

Bitcoin’s resilience increases when those who use the network, ‘the economic majority’, take custody of their coins, run their own nodes, connect their wallets to and broadcast transactions from their nodes, and form circular economies by transacting with Bitcoin.

This increases the decentralisation of the network and eliminates rent-seeking intermediaries, making Bitcoin a truly global monetary system that isn’t concentrated in a particular geographical region.

The sheer number of initiatives which decide to focus only on Bitcoin is quite staggering.

Only Bitcoin has this. Its network effects are the strongest and we expect more such initiatives to spring up in the coming years.

If you’re a part of a grassroots initiative based in Europe, we’re building products that can help you.

Reach out to us, we’re happy to help.