Bitcoin for Billions, Not for Billionaires: The Staggering Story of the Lightning Network Worldwide
Charity Water project will disrupt mindsets all over the world.
Scott Harrison was born in the suburbs of New York City in a happy family until one day his mother collapsed on the bedroom floor. Harrison was four years old at that time, and his mother suffered from a carbon monoxide gas leak, and her immune system died that day.
She became allergic to everything, and she had to wear strange masks often connected to oxygen all the time.
After the poisoning, Scott Harrison had to help his father doing a little of everything at home. He had to take care of his mother for his father to pay the bills with his job and side-hustles.
Harrison was a good Christian kid who played the piano at the church and wanted to be a doctor when he grew up to help sick people like his mother.
Then, he became an adolescent.
He moved to New York, joined a music band, and then became a nightclub promoter. He managed to arrange beautiful and rich people for parties and charge $500 a bottle of champagne that cost $40.
From club to club, alcohol and drugs, beautiful women, a Rolex in his wrist, and ten years smocking two packs of cigarettes a night, strip clubs, and gambling, Harrison seemed to have lost his way.
At one particular party in Uruguay, in an incredible house near the beach, expensive champagne, amazing dancers, and massive production, a long decline in happiness starts to invade Harrisson’s soul.
I tried to find my way back to very lost faith.- Scott Harrison
To compensate for his lack of happiness, he sold everything he had and took a year off, trying to find his mean of helping others instead of himself.
He tried to apply to various humanitarian organizations, but nobody wanted him. They didn’t even want him volunteering.
Fortunately, one organization said if Scott would pay $500 a month, he could join them.
A fantastic team of doctors and surgeons who travel the world in a hospital ship specialized in removing face tumors accepted Scott. They went into Liberia, one of the poorest countries in the world.
As Harrison went to some villages, he started to see how locals drink water. They literally drunk water from swamps full of mosquitoes and bugs. Most kids die before they were 10 years old of cholera or diarrhea and other infectious diseases.
785 million people live on our planet without access to clean water.
So, Harrison started to do what he did best. He came back to New York and began organizing parties. But this time, charging money to finance his new project.
Charity Water started on his 31st birthday party, with 700 people spending money to raise $15,000. They immediately took that money to Northern Uganda, built three wells, and then sent back photos of the water infrastructure in those villages providing clean water back to those 700 people.
Most western country citizens don’t trust charities, but this way of doing things was utterly disrupted. If you donate to Charity Water, you can track your money, you can see what country and village your money goes to.
And that was a game-changer.
Quality improves with effort accordingly to an exponential curve.
One day, Scott Harrison was in a charity event, and one of his donators wanted to donate in Bitcoin. So, Harrison received a 559 Bitcoin donation that he sold the next day for 4.4 million dollars. Yet, if he’d keep it and sold it in April 2021, it would worth 35 million dollars.
With all that 559 Bitcoin, Charity Water helped more than 100,000 people, but they could help six to nine hundred thousand human beings if they’ve kept the Bitcoin a little while.
Could the charity keep the asset and benefit from its appreciation? Should they borrow in dollars collateralizing their Bitcoins?
Harrison started to talk with some staff members to find a way to hodl their Bitcoin, meaning to keep Bitcoin to appreciate in a certain amount of time. That’s where they decided they would keep all Bitcoin (hodl) until 2025.
There’s a risk in this strategy. If Bitcoin loses value until 2025, at that time, Charity Water will help fewer people than it would help today. Charities never do that. Yet, charities never had to deal with this kind of situation before.
In 14 years, Scott Harrison raised an impressive 550 million dollars in donations. Charity Water helped 12 million people having clean water since day one. Yet, it’s 1.6% of the global problem.
Bitcoin could provide a unique exponential story for Charity Water.
In a US dollar structure, Charity Water is about to build a trust fund to hodl Bitcoin. And as it will hopefully appreciate over time, as it is in its early adoption worldwide, Harrison will be able to exponentially build not 10 wells but 1,000 wells in 2025.
So he will help not 1.6% of people who don’t have clean water, but 10% or more. So 10% of 785 million people is 78.5 million human beings drinking clean water.
That’s almost the entire population of Germany.
Lightning makes no sound until it strikes.
The Bitcoin lightning network works in El Salvador as well as in Chicago, Lisbon, or Sydney. That’s why it’s the most inclusive network.
Having the dollar and the euro system working smoothly in our countries, most of us don’t realize 3/4 of the world doesn’t have this kind of privilege.
You don’t have dirty water for your kids to drink, the same way you don’t have your currency so devalued so that you never make it out of the poverty line.
You and I don’t have this kind of problem, so we internalize they don’t exist.
However, 785 million people, two times the size of the entire US population, don’t have clean water to drink. Currently, two billion people worldwide cannot access financial services because their data is not held on ‘traditional’ sources.
What if the Bitcoin Lightning network would solve part of that problem?
Most recently, I wrote an article about Jack Mallers, a young entrepreneur that created Strike, an open-source payment system developed in the lightning network that permits anyone with a phone device to download an app, create a wallet, and buy, sell, or hodl Bitcoin, at the speed of light, with almost no fees.
I hope technology and innovation reach the poorest people. Frankly, I don’t give a sheet about the rich countries; they have minor problems, yes, but 3/4 of the world is fighting for survival.
Final Thoughts
While rich countries play power games, debating whether Bitcoin is an asset or not, 3/4 of the world fights for survival.
While the world of the rich thinks it has the right to luxury hospitals and roads, 3/4 of the world struggles to have dignity in their daily lives.
This is the real problem with money.
There is too much money in rich countries, making them immoral, rotten, and cynical. While 3/4 of the world is short of cash, making it fragile, hopeless, and hungry.
Over 45,000 people die of starvation, 38,000 of them children, every single day.
There’s something fundamentally wrong in our planet, in our morality, inside our brains.
When I listen to Scott Harrison or Jack Mallers, I see hope because they give me the notion of how lucky I am to live in a European country, where I can raise my daughters in clean water and a secure environment.
Yet, what kind of morality do I have in a world where 45-year-old fathers don’t have the same luxury?
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