Brazil’s bitcoin citadel, known as Bitcoin Beach (Praia Bitcoin in Portuguese), is teaching elementary school children to use the cryptocurrency to buy what they consume daily, during recess.
Thus, in a school in the community of Jericoacoara, the children are buying fruit with a debit card and a point of sale based on the Bitcoin Lightning network.
Jericoacoara (also known as Jijoca or spelled Gijoca) is a small fishing village come beach hippie resort in Ceará, Brazil, some 300 km west of Fortaleza. (source)
“We are faster than Visa or MasterCard and the kids love it,” the Citadel team says on its Twitter account.
In videos shared, several schoolchildren can be seen paying 10 sats (the minimum bitcoin measure) for each fruit they purchase.
The experience is completed using a mobile point of sale for Lightning from Breez Technology and a Bolt Card for bitcoin payments from the company CoinCorner, as specified by the community.
Some merchants in the area are incorporating similar payment systems as demonstrated in another publication by Fernando Motolese, founder of Brazil’s Bitcoin Beach Citadel. He believes that with easy-to-use methods will grow the bitcoin circular economy that they have been pushing for since last year.
More momentum for bitcoin’s circular economy
The project’s plan is to ditch, in its entirety, the use of fiat money that is controlled by governments to create a local economy based on “real and peaceful money,” which is how they categorize bitcoin.
“The proposal for a circular economy must exploit the legacy system using its tools and laws to provide real freedom and reduction of slavery. By using bitcoin and deciding for peaceful money, you will receive time back. Over the years, you will reduce your level of slavery and become a sovereign individual. Since you are no longer part of the problem, you will be able to fix the world by fixing money.”
However, there are still several drawbacks to be solved when paying with bitcoin using QR codes. The main difficulty arises in the difference in BTC prices recorded by the different platforms involved in the process.
For this reason, users “can pay with an incorrect amount or with a giant differential, sometimes 5% or 10%,” as stated on Twitter.
Given this, the group continues to search for technological alternatives to help them create the best bitcoin-based community bank. As a result, they point out that “adoption takes time and several store visits, but it is happening!”.
In early November, the community organized a workshop for children to learn how to pay with a bitcoin payment card using the LNBits gateway.
At that time, Motolese stressed to the younger members of the community the importance of learning how to use bitcoin as a way to save for the future.
