From beer to Bitcoin as legal tender: A BTC education in Roatán

cointelegraph.com:

Few crypto enthusiasts around the world could point to the remote island of Roatán prior to the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami. 

Dušan Matuska was one of them, a Bitcoin (BTC) educator whose plans to open a Bitcoin education center in a former brewery entangled with the Satoshi Nakamoto-inspired vision of a special economic zone in Honduras called Próspera. Located on Roatán, Próspera accepts Bitcoin as a de facto legal tender as of April 2022.

But how did a Slovakian Bitcoin miner stumble across one of the few locations worldwide to accept Bitcoin as de facto legal tender? And, what does a brewery have to do with it?

In late 2021, Matuska’s Bitcoin mining friends mentioned the Honduran isle of Roatan, explaining their intention to buy a few plots of land on the picture-perfect island. Given the success of neighboring country El Salvador and the Bitcoin Beach Bitcoin adoption story, as well as his personal mission to teach 100 million people about Bitcoin by 2030, Matuska’s curiosity was piqued.

Matuska flew over from Paraguay, where he was investigating renewable Bitcoin mining operations, and quickly learned Roatán is a “nice small island in Honduras” that has “beautiful views.” It’s like a “hidden pearl of the Caribbean.”

However, it’s small, so “after two weeks having a holiday there, you start to get bored.”

In line with other Bitcoin grassroots projects around the world such as El Salvador and Portland, Oregon, while drawing from his own experience educating people about Bitcoin at crypto cafés in Eastern Europe, Matuska began scoping out centers for Bitcoin education.

A curious coincidence, Matuska is Slovakian — Czechs and Slovakians are close and share similar culture and histories — and Czech is the