The BitCafe Story
El Salvador is home to some of the finest specialty coffees in the world, grown by small farmers who, over generations, developed a unique culture around the land, the people, and the processes for savoring the tastes and subtle notes of a fine cup of coffee. Our BitCafe Project emerged out of this generational passion for fine coffee culture. Jorge Cruz Rubio, a son of Salvador, educated in the United States and Europe, and employed by big tech as a team leader, found himself inevitably drawn back to his native land and culture, with a passion for bringing fine Salvadoran coffee to the markets he had spent much of his life in…the US and Europe. The nagging challenge was how?
Coffee, as a commodity that is in high demand around the world, has become emblematic of the corporate cartels that control global supply chains and, in the name of consumer convenience, squeeze small farmers, who hand cultivate high quality, environmentally sustainable specialty coffee, into the maw of the huge combines that depress prices at the harvest, in order to reward the shareholders of their global food brands. The current system, built on a centralized fiat standard, simply doesn’t work for small farmers trying to develop a niche of coffee connoisseurs and aficionados.
Jorge Cruz, returning to his native Salvador, embarked on a new journey. As early as 2016, he sought to develop a peer-to-peer system that allowed the specialty coffee from the BioKrop Project and the Dos Mundos Cafe to present high quality blends and recipes to customers at a fair price that rewards small farmers, not squeeze them through unnecessary third-party intermediaries who dilute the fine coffee culture. By 2019, the Dos Mundos Cafe in the beach town of El Zonte, later “Bitcoin Beach,” was installing the first bitcoin ATM and selling beans-for-sats to beach fanatics and surfers from Salvador and all over the world. In step with the development of bitcoin as the first digital currency declared legal tender by a nation-state, Jorge and Dos Mundos were there with the global pioneers in payments and education, at Hope House, at Casa del Bitcoin (by Paxful), and traveling the circuit in the Cherito, with Mi Primer Bitcoin, teaching about bean-to-cup specialty coffee and bitcoin first principles.
Starting with an intellectual journey down the Bitcoin rabbit hole to grasp the concept of money in the modern global system, followed by a physical journey to El Salvador to look first-hand into a future economy based on hard money concepts, Steve Wilmarth came to understand the power of a grassroots effort that Dos Mundos helped initiate in El Zonte, to change a system of money that had not worked in the modern era for people not of the privileged monetary class. The BitCafe Project was born out of deep conversations with small coffee growers and laborers, with community activists in Latin America, and marginalized communities in the developed world, and with bitcoiners whose time preferences scale to the unborn generations who we hope inherit a world where fairness, opportunity, and private property rights abound. History tells us that as much as the systems we live under seem immutable, we should not be complacent about accepting things the way they are. Our human progress…civilization, the Renaissance, exploration of the cosmos…has come as a result of challenging the status quo and accepting new ideas where the facts lead us.
The BitCafe Project combines its concept of a superior cafe experience that provides effective education in bitcoin as digital money, with Tierra Bendita and Dos Mundos’ proprietary seed-to-cup stack, in a global grassroots effort to on-board new adherents to a bitcoin standard. It is an opportunity for open exploration, knowledge, and progress towards a greater community. We stand on the shoulders of giants…the early adopters, the mathematicians, the community activists…in order to design and build a space where people gather…to enjoy a specialty coffee, to start a conversation about emerging technologies that change the way we transact in the world, and to directly engage in community development and service. We seek a better future for ourselves, our families, and our communities.
The BitCafe Project is a place where we can begin the journey.
