I discovered a house with garage & garden for sale in the same street where I am living for two months now. I would like to fund a bitcoin educational center there.
The house is located in Maracay, Venezuela which is a city with 1 million inhabitants, about 100km from Caracas and 200km to Barquisimeto.
The house is located just 25km to some of the most beautiful beaches of Venezuela.
I want to finance the house with 145 SLP tokens each of $100 worth, which results in $12000 which is the price for that house + $2500 that would be invested in renovation + furniture = $14500
I will use the notary.bitcoin.com service to also persist that document on the BCH chain. Then I will post a memo including the hash of that document with a foto of that contract.
I tried to start a flipstarter campaign but sadly the DigitalOcean site wont let me deploy anything without having a bank account, therefore I can not use that service as I am living on Bitcoin only for several years already.
I might opt to host a flipstarter myself if that is really necessary, but for a small proposal like this one, it might just work with read.cash comment function.
That means the auction of the SLP tokens is started now and if you would like to get a token then I expect you to leave a comment here below that article with the amount of tokens that you would like to buy.
Then after all the 120 tokens got reserved I will go trough the comments and ask each one to send the funds to a specific wallet address. Each commenter will get their own bch address so that it is clear who paid what.
This method should work just as fine as the flipstarter and might even attract a wider audience who is not so tech savy to know how to use fipstarter. Even as I would love to host it on flipstarter to give priority to these who are flipping, so if anyone has an opportunity to host that flipstarter on their server easily, tell me.
My background story
Some of you might know me from this video:
An Interview by the Crypto Economist in english
https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2020/04/18/the-real-bitcoin-club/
An article from the Cointelegraph (I still have an open Interview with them and I would like to present the success of this proposal in that interview)
Android, IPhone and Web apps related to Bitcoin Map
I have started several projects promoting Bitcoin adoption of which you can find the source code on Github: http://github.com/therealbitcoinclub
I developed a prototype of local currency backed with BCH at the end of 2018 in Tarifa, Spain: https://tarifacash.firebaseapp.com/#/
The most well known of my projects is http://bitcoinmap.cash which promotes all the places where one can spend Bitcoin in their neighborhood. That project comes with two Android apps and one IPhone app.
Buying a Pizza with BCH in Caracas
Buying a coffee with bitcoin
I started my Bitcoin journey in 2013, got unbanked in 2015 and got seriously active within the community right after BCH was created at the end of 2017. I was active in Reddit from time to time when I felt that it would be important to join the discussion.
I founded The Real Bitcoin Club in Spain, better said Catalunya, Barcelona and started onboarding businesses to the Android App that I had developed: http://bitcoinmap.cash/android
I have given several talks in Spanish about Bitcoin, for example this is the opening event of TRBC - The Real Bitcoin Club (that video is in spanish):
After a short while at the beginning of April 2018 I had succesfully convinced the shop owner of my favourite organic supermarket to accept Bitcoin Cash payments and since then I have purchased all my food with Bitcoin Cash, DASH, ETH or BTC.
In the following video I am presenting a bitcoin NFC card (in that same organic supermarket) that I had configured to facilitate BCH payments (I had a vision of releasing an easy tappable NFC card so that customers could pay in the less complicated low cost fashion using a NFC card as Point of Sale basically, which works very well on events & in bars or even for personal use)
Since 2.5 years I follow a very strong principle which does not allow me to use paper money. I do not own any bank account since 2015 when the bank closed my account as they realized I was trading bitcoin. Nowadays I mostly buy my foods using Bitrefill as I recharge the phones of these who give me fruits and vegetables.
After three months of onboarding businesses in the anarchistic neighborhood "Vila de Gracia" in the heart of Barcelona I did present the finished project which consisted of about 40 places that were accepting BCH:
I am a true believer of bitcoin, I do not have any bank account and I have all my assets in various cryptos of which BCH is the majority of my portfolio.
There was another project which we realized as "The Real Bitcoin Club" which was that we bought 30 wifi headphones with the bitcoin logo from a fabric in china and we promoted a few events called "Silent Bitcoin Disco" where some of the listeners would put on a headphone to have better sound quality without having to listen to the bar chats. We also hosted an event in a park where the headphones made much more sense but still inside the bar it made sense as we could party longer than any other bar, as other bars had to close at a certain time because of the noise. I managed these events alone and I promoted them alone, but I had some investors to which I am very grateful for giving me the opportunity to do what my passion is.
There was a time from April 2019 to August 2019 when I was promoting DASH because I bought into the lies of several DASH promoters like George Donnelly but the biggest scammer seems to be Lorenzo Rey who massively faked statistics (with who I worked together) and Ryan Taylor the CEO of DASH Core Group himself.
I was sponsored for a few months by Lorenzo Rey to promote DashText, I also released a DashText, CoinText & Cointigo app because i strongly believe that we need to have SMS payments in Venezuela (CoinText does not work here, Cointigo does not support BCH, so I had to go with DASH & DashText):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cash.bitcoinmap.dashtext
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cash.bitcoinmap.cointext
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cash.bitcoinmap.cointigo
Sadly my Instagram and Facebook account got recently deleted, there you could see that I was working heavily during the past 2.5 years on spreading adoption. http://facebook.com/felizchelou & http://instagram.com/bitcoinmap were the accounts which are deleted now.
I also got my first Twitter account shut down in 2018 already as apparently someone does not want me to spread Bitcoin Cash adoption. Then in Venezuela the new account was also suspended for a few days but then got magically reactivated as I exposed the strategy of Twitter to shut users out of their accounts by asking them to receive a SMS to a number that they never added to their account.
So I chosed to switch to memo.cash completely where I am one of the most active accounts: https://memo.cash/profile/1KfJVRuS3gBrz5cVMjsFxqsKoK5E7sLhLe
Moving to Venezuela
In April 2019 I decided to move to Venezuela to push adoption where my efforts & bankroll is worth most and where the chance is the highest that the population will actually adopt it as their main currency. From the first day I found places which accepted DASH and because DASH is much more popular in Caracas than BCH I started to work on promoting DASH and BCH.
CoinMap - Coinector (Android & IPhone App)
In May 2019 I released a second app for that Bitcoin Map service which is also compatible with Apple and focuses more on the images than the map:
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cash.bitcoinmap.coinector
IPhone: https://apps.apple.com/om/app/coinmap-bitcoin-map/id1522720562
OpenBazaar
I onboarded 5 BCH businesses in June 2019 within one week and earned $25 for that, I hosted that job on OpenBazaar, I was offering to onboard one business for $5 and I got paid to onboard 5 of them. Even as I was mainly promoting DASH but I believe strongly in free markets and giving the free choice to the customer.
DashText
DASH was simply way more popular than BCH at that time in Caracas and it had that service DashText which was crucial to spread adoption to these merchants that I cared about, these who did not have bank accounts and worked on the streets without paying any taxes. So these merchants which would otherwise only accept cash now had an option to receive DASH via textmessage. That project worked well as quite a few merchants started to spend their income at the other merchants.
I successfully promoted DashText from July to September and was the most frequent user with thousands of transactions within a few months. I donated some cents of DASH to anyone who would have enough curiosity to try it and I onboarded about 20 places in Caracas where I was buying frequently with DashText.
Bitcoin Mining
In October 2019 I funded a mining farm in Venezuela with the help of some german investors and I still own a few antminers which are mining BCH
I want to install these miners at the house in a seperate anexo as a showcase to introduce more people to mining at the meetups.
Feliz Chelou (thats my name)
I basically have donated the past 2.5 years to work on Bitcoin adoption with just a very short break in between where i programmed for an insurance company in Germany as a freelancer to get some cash to invest during the biggest dip of the market. Basically working for fake money was attractive to me again as the price of BCH had dropped so much that it made sense to grab some fake money energy to bring it into the BCH market cap.
I know how to set goals and achieve them, I am very much into the bitcoin movement, that is what I wanted to demonstrate with all the examples above.
I am very actively living for the dream of a world which has bitcoin as its main currency and I assume that Bitcoin Cash has the best chance to be that coin.
I have a lot of experience in using bitcoin services all around the world, I have personally introduced 100+ merchants and 500+ individuals to bitcoin.
I have good presentation & management skills, I can also lead software programming teams & manage any kind of business as I did that a few times. I worked a lot in promotion & education aside from my job as software developer & poker player. I guess I am a good responsible manager for that center.
I speak german which is my mother tongue, english & spanish fluently. I also speak portuguese, italian & french partially. I love to learn languages and would be able to welcome community members from all around the world.
PETRO
I did also teach a bakery in Caracas on how to manage the PETRO, how to trade it for bitcoin and then for bolivars, how to close the circle to be one of the only shops in town that would understand how the PETRO actually works. Many shops who accepted the PETRO in the beginning stopped accepting it after one month, but this bakery as he had the tools to do the trading was able to keep accepting PETRO and until today the PETRO is his main business. That bakery had a very succesful time as their cashier desks went from one to five as there was so much demand to spend the PETRO that was donated to the population. I basically supported him with the promotion and there were also a few clients that came to pay with DASH or BCH.
I am not a huge fan of the PETRO but I see the opportunities which the bitcoin community has in Venezuela and how we can integrate the PETRO to onboard more people to the bitcoin ecosystem.
This video here (in spanish) is made by me while i am filming that guy "Luis Elvis" who is a well known venezuelan who promotes crypto, he already interviewed me on his channel before and we had meetings with some PETRO lawyers and developers.
The Proposal
I want to give the community the chance to write bitcoin history and obtain a SLP tokenized property using the notary.bitcoin.com system. We can buy this house without any involvement by the government.
I would sign the contract as representative of the token, I will write the token hash into the contract. I have no right to behave as the owner of that property if I am not holding all the tokens. All that will be written in the contract. I am just the manager for the next few years and I might want to move on, in case that there is nobody who wants to continue managing that house we could still sell it and distribute the funds to the token holders. I plan to stay in Venezuela for about 5-10 years more for sure, maybe for the lifetime. Maybe we can fund more houses all around the globe this way over the course of the next decade.
In Venezuela the notary is not obligatory as I informed myself that we can transfer the house with a private contract and as we have the service by bitcoin.com that could be the first house in history that is tokenized and notarized by the BCH chain.
The house has three bedrooms and I want to reserve two rooms of that house as guests rooms, so that BCH community members could come around in Venezuela and see by themselves how beautiful that nation really is.
Anyone who holds atleast one token can come around for one week of vacation per year, the token can be traded easily, the more tokens one holds, the more time can be spent at the center. Starting at 48 tokens you can permanently live here.
One bedroom is reserved for the house manager, whoever takes that job in the future, I will start with it. The manager lives here for free even if he has no tokens as he is doing the job of managing the center. The job of the manager is to organize the events, promote the events & upload video reports of the events.
The house has space for ten people sleeping here easily, so even a small group could come around and sleep all around the house or garage, the climate allows sleeping outside easily.
It is located 25km to the beach of Choroni in the city of Maracay. So it is a very nice place to come around and have some vacation here while spending BCH at the shops that I am planning to onboard here.
You can reach the center of the city in 30 minutes by bike or by bus which leaves just a few hundreds meter from that house. With a taxi it takes 15 minutes.
Close to the house (1.5km) is the huge distributors market of Maracay where one can buy all the fresh & packaged foods at large discounts in quantities. This is the place where one gets the supply for the supermarket and BCH delivery service.
The climate in Maracay is comfortably warm, day and night, tshirt & shorts weather all year long.
The street noise is very little, the birds from the streets are much louder, beautiful place for programming inside and outside.
The house has a size of 10x10m, the area with roof in total is 14m wide x 17m long, the whole property is 14m wide and 30m long.
The house needs a little bit of work to be done, I want to fix the roof which has some cracks, I want to raise the wall around that property, I want to fix the floor which needs a little bit of cement, I will have to buy a water pump, ventilators, table, chairs & beds for the guest rooms. I also want to paint the walls and paint a beautiful BCH logo at the entrance wall. Total cost of all that work would be 2500.
The idea is that anyone who obtains atleast one of these 145 tokens has the right to make a vacation of one week per year in this house close to the beach in an area that accepts bitcoin payments. On the other side, if someone would like to own his own bedroom within that house he could obtain 48 tokens which is 1/3 of the total cost. He then could come around and live here at any time.
I was living in Caracas during the past 1.5 years since I arrived in Venezuela and just recently (2 months) moved to Maracay. I find Maracay ten times more attractive than Caracas, as it is much more relaxed. The quality of life in Maracay is way higher than in Caracas. The streets are clean and the water & electric supply is stable.
The propaganda which reaches the population outside of Venezuela is packed full of massive lies, as you can see in this video, food is always available and in contrast to other places there was no food shortage during the pandemic, except for gasoline which is often short but I dont care about that as public transport works great.
To me Venezuela is a paradise, it offers such a rich culture and unlimited opportunities because the market is much less developed and they are lacking programmers here, so as a programmer who loves to eat the most delivious fruits at the lowest cost & wants to have sunshine all year around, while living in a "criptonacion" that promotes bitcoin on national tv by the president himself, this is a paradise.
I have lived in Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Malta & Greece during my life and I swear Venezuela is my favourite by far as the quality of life is so high for even a small budget. To me it is the perfect place to be a retired programmer who wants to spend his time on his own projects without having the pressure to pay any high recurring costs. All the services in this area are for free, water, electricity, trash, the government does not charge any tax to the house owners in this area.
I checked the internet connection at the house and I am getting 4G LTE mobile internet with both providers Digitel & Movistar, which is also very important to what I am planning and quite rare in Venezuela.
The house has a high roof, it has space for several cars in its outdoor garage/terrace where we can host the events, the whole house & garage has a high level of security.
The structure of that house can be raised for up to 3 floors, so if that house becomes a success, we could start another crowdfunding to build the second floor later on. In Venezuela you can just start building and material is cheap and work force even cheaper. I woud say for as little as a few thousand dollars we could add one or two more floors.
The house has an underground fresh water tank of 8000 liters.
The house has ceramic tiles all inside the house.
The neighbors are easy, as I am living in that same street I was able to observe them and I also talked to some neighbors which were all very friendly.
Maracay is a city with a lot of military, these are the people that have PETRO and dont know what to do with that, so I want to explain them how to change their PETRO for BCH. Or I want to invite them to events explaining them how to use their PETRO while at the same time telling them about Bitcoin Cash and which opportunities it offers:
I want to host events explaining all the following services:
Bitrefill, CoinEx, Bitcoin.com wallet, Purse.io, Bitcoinmap.cash, read.cash, memo.cash, mint.bitcoin.com, flipstarter, mining, show movies related to bitcoin philosophy in a small cinema.
I want to offer bitcoin trades at this house and give everyone the chance to use services like Amazon or Bitrefill of which they are shut out otherwise, but which are very benefitial to them.
I want to host regular weekly meetups & monthly events and upload these videos so that anyone can see what progress the center is making.
I want to put some antminers in a structure in the garden and make that like a showcase for events, so that I can introduce more people to mining BCH, as mining in Venezuela is extremely lucrative as the electricity is for free
I am already selling foods like a small super market from my basement and I am in the works of developing a bitcoin delivery app which will be integrated with the apps already developed.
I have reliable employees that work with me for $20 per month on selling the refills or delivering foods for BCH payments.
Apart from the benefits the house offers to the whole community, it gives me a space to finish the programming on BCH related projects and maybe even hire developers to work with me in that house.
The Garden with two varieties of mango fruit trees
Backside of the house
Left side of the house
Garage looking to the back side
The roof is in good condition, just has a few cracks at the sides to the garden
The front yard
Modern electric cable right in front of the house
Looking at the front door from the living room
The first living room
The second living room
View from the first living room to the back yard
The first living room
The 1st bedroom
The 2nd bedroom
The 3rd bedroom
The kitchen is in the garage, beautiful to hang out together on a meetup
View from the garden to the garage door
The streets are clean in this neighborhood
The bathroom
The front side
All the bedrooms have a window to the garage
Nice one