Bitcoin Service Providers Emerging Worldwide
We need to integrate Bitcoin nodes with accounting systems and open-source the solutions, enabling new Bitcoin Community Banks to emerge. Let's build it!
A Bitcoin Community Bank is essentially a Bitcoin Service Provider (BSP) created to guide users. It is being designed to transform "normies" into bitcoiners.
The @blinkbtc, formerly known as Bitcoin Beach Wallet, shared valuable insights about this concept in this article:
Bitcoin Banking for Communities: Lessons Learned from Bitcoin Beach. galoy.io/galoy-blog/bit…
@GaloyMoney helped @Bitcoinbeach in El Zonte onboard an entire community, which significantly influenced global Bitcoin adoption, eventually leading to El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as legal tender and sparking the Bitcoin Circular Economy Big Bang.
Praia Bitcoin Jericoacoara was born on #BitcoinDay, September 7, 2021, as the third Bitcoin economy to use @lightning as a medium of exchange, following Bitcoin Beach's goal to create and sustain a local Bitcoin economy.
Future BSPs will be responsible for onboarding merchants, maintaining local infrastructure, and guiding users through their first steps into the Bitcoin ecosystem. They will help users stack sats, self-custody, manage wallets, calculate taxes, understand market cycles, exchange privately, manage UTXOs, and transact with Bitcoin debit cards.
The Bitcoin Community Bank is more than just @halfin's theory of Bitcoin-backed banks.
rextar4444.medium.com/hal-finneys-th…
It’s the missing piece in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, traditional banks are integrating Bitcoin in their own closed-source way, labeling it as "crypto" and allowing its use with legacy cards like @Visa and @Mastercard.
With tools like @mynodebtc, @umbrel, and @voltage, several BSPs are poised to emerge and revamp the banking system. However, no legacy accounting system is fully ready for Bitcoin—only a draft, designed by @ZapriteApp, exists.
Thanks to the support of over 1,300 donors, Praia Bitcoin is moving towards developing the first Bitcoin Community Bank. Still, we need to bridge the gaps and build the necessary tools, raise money and respect all regulations.
Here’s a list of challenges that will require significant development:
✔️ Integrate legacy accounting software with Bitcoin, accounting in SATs. This has been done with @Quickbooks by calculating the price per SAT for the exchange rate and accounting for every 1 SAT = 1 BTC. However, no SAT account is available, and @ZohoBooks ignored our requests!
✔️ We now need to import XPUB (ZPUB) to retrieve the wallet history, account for transactions, and categorize them like standard accounts. While this isn't possible on QuickBooks, it’s nearly achievable with @ZapriteApp.
✔️ Track the approximate fiat amount history with a trustworthy API. This is possible with @coingecko (price at the moment), while the draft solution used Yahoo’s BTC-USD historical price.
✔️ We cannot monitor Lightning transactions on accounting software. We need to create webhooks for integration.
✔️ We need to improve the @bolt_card protocol, update it to BOLT12, and develop management software that facilitates easy issuance, management, and reporting. The last have been drafted with @BitcoinJungleCR, @Pipefy, and @Lnbits, with important improvements to respect Brazilian regulations.
✔️ We need to create a @BtcPayServer plugin to export an OFX file, ready for import into any traditional accounting system. This has been drafted with @zapier, @ChatGPTapp, and 100 lines of Python.
✔️ We need to make all wallets adopt the OFX Standard. Now we have unstandardized CSV files on @Blink, @Breez_Tech, @ZeusLN with no price per SAT in FIAT. Basicly the OFX needs only the date, the account, the amount in BTC, the price per sat in fiat and price per BTC, finally the fiat amount, and the description (with all metadata available).
✔️ We need a cheaper and better Bitcoin Point of Sale device for payments with a lottery miner integrated. A draft version exists with @Bitcoinize Machine, but we need new BSPs to install it and the product is quite expensive. Finally, there’s no android miner app available (just a separated hardware like Bitaxe) that allows full block construction.
✔️ We need to turn the @FBCEglobal into a legal structure that uses bitcoin as unit of account. To do so, we need to fundraise the Federation and register a non-profit organization on @prosperaglobal. With funds available and a legal structure, the Federation will be allowed to provide support, training and infrastructure, with a legal framework to protect all founders.
So, that’s it. Let’s build together. Open-source everything.
Fernando Motolese
@Motolese
Praia Bitcoin Jericoacoara
