Próspera, Roatán — Bitcoin Vibecamp '26 & What Comes Next
Even though my stay was fairly short at just 9 days, there’s enough to unpack across 3 domains:
- Bitcoin Vibecamp 🏕️
- Próspera & Roatán.🏝️
- Future plans & the napkin math. 🧮
1. Bitcoin Vibecamp 🏕️
The experience
So, about Bitcoin Vibecamp? It should go without saying that this was fun, educational and a great onboarding experience into Nostr & Bitcoin development.
A very big thank you to @TomekK for setting this up and @FrancisMars for teaching the plebs and sharing his “Chain Duel is life” philosophy, along with his software development and Nostr experience.
Although more mentors were initially expected, I think we had the perfect number for the 4-day build and the group size.
If you feel like signing up for version 0.2, here’s the link!
The bootcamp & what people built
I won’t go into detail about the process of the 4-day vibecamp, as this is more of a summary of the whole experience. You can see the end results here:
https://bitcoinvibe.camp/x/#games
The Olympics
The group & people dynamics
The most important thing—and I don’t think I can stress this enough—is the people and the great group dynamic. None of this would have been possible without the builders:
My apologies if I missed any of you here 😄
2. Próspera & Roatán 🏝️
Property & facilities
Jeej, visiting another Bitcoin island 🥳 The Duna Tower and the Bitcoin Center are perfectly suited to hosting these types of events. Pay with bitcoin and work where you stay—you can’t go wrong with that formula.
Parts of the Próspera development are still being built out, and some of the long-term plans are quite impressive, as is the infrastructure already built in such a short time span. In general, though, I’d sum it up like this: there are some great facilities around the island to keep you entertained. 🤿🐢🪸
Cost & transportation
It’s quite a journey from Europe, depending on your timing, but from North & South America, it’s a much more convenient flight. One important thing: you’ll need a vehicle to properly get around.
Setting up a business
So, from what I can tell, a bunch of young entrepreneurs are setting up shop there. I won’t go into detail about how to set up a corporate enterprise there or why it makes sense, but it looks fairly easy to do, and the benefits are quite impressive.
Initially, a side quest was to see whether setting up the Open Markets Foundation there instead of in the USA made more sense. For now, I don’t think it’ll be necessary, but it’s an interesting place to set up shop nevertheless.
3. Future plans & the math
What could a next version look like?
Improvements to the format or mentoring.
Since this was version 0.1 of the vibecamp and only lasted 4 days, everything had to be fairly condensed. With a couple more days, the curriculum could include a bit more work on a traditional backend setup for vibecoding.
A different topic?
The focus for this one was to learn the tools and workflow, using a game as the end goal. Different end goals, like a general sovereign engineering bootcamp or an open markets / e-commerce project, could draw in a different audience and lead to projects that could be maintained over the longer term.
The math
So, for all of these initiatives, you’d end up with a cost breakdown something like this for each participant.
Travel & transportation.
A return trip from Europe is around $1,500, compared with $280–$300 from the USA. Of course, that depends on where you start, so a multi-week stay is highly recommended.
Accommodation & workspace.
A stay at Duna Tower plus a meal plan runs about $550 per week per person.
Duration.
Funnily enough, this post should have been out a little while ago, but it’s been delayed. I was just listening to the No Solutions podcast, E37: “Advanced Malware”, which touches on the relationship between a cohort’s intensity and its duration. The same applies to ours: 4 days is, of course, a bit short, but good for a trial. For more functional results, it would need to be at least 2 weeks, in my humble opinion.
Estimated cost per participant.
So, roughly, a 2-week trip would come to a little north of $3,000 for someone travelling from the EU and around $1,900 for someone travelling from the USA. This takes into account some extra costs for mentors and side trips.
Conclusion
I used to teach short courses and a couple of courses in professional bachelor’s programmes, so this was quite a fun relapse into an old version of myself.
In summary, I’d say this was a good validation of the idea that people in very diverse domains can now integrate agentic AI to build small tools for themselves and offer some shared MVP functionality over Nostr.
For the vibecamp itself, replicating formats like #soveng and #vibecamp is one of the best ways for us to showcase what’s possible and bring new nostriches over to our side. So I’m happy to see more of these initiatives.
And once again, thanks to @TomekK for creating this vibecamp initiative. Go! 🥳 Team humans 🤖
Again, a shameless plug: if version 0.2 sounds interesting, sign up here!
Write a comment