Your daily dose of Jamaican News With a lil Patois sometimes 🏝️📰🇯🇲
Jamaica launched Jam-Dex in 2022 as one of the world's first CBDCs. Four years later, adoption is crawling. The problem isn't the technology, it's the control. Bitcoin offers something Jam-Dex never can: money that answers to nobody.
Dancehall artists built Jamaica's most powerful media network without a radio station, a label, or permission. Today, streaming platforms are the new gatekeepers, taking the biggest cut while paying fractions of a cent. Lightning and Nostr offer a way back to the direct artist-to-fan model that soundsystem culture was built on.
Long before Bitcoin, Jamaican Maroons built self-governing communities outside colonial control. The treaty of 1739 recognized what they already created: freedom by their own hand. Bitcoin carries that same spirit into the digital age.
Scarcity alone doesn't make something valuable. Your child's painting is one of a kind but nobody's buying it. Bitcoin is valuable because it's useful AND scarce. Here's the first-principles breakdown.
Jamaica's informal economy is 30% of GDP and runs on cash, trust, and networks like the partner system. Lightning doesn't replace that — it just removes the ceiling.
Jamaica receives over US$3.3 billion in remittances every year — but the fees eat into every dollar. Here's what the Lightning Network could save Jamaican families.
Jamaican grandmothers been teaching Bitcoin philosophy for generations. Patience, self-reliance, saving for the future, not trusting easily. They just didn't have a name for it. Now we do.
