Welcome!

I had a 2 hour call with George Donnelly this Saturday to discuss this proposal, to learn about the management, and to discuss in more depth this proposal. I was most impressed with what I learned and wanted to share some of the things I learned from the call.

What I learned is that DASH mass adoption is already happening in South America. They have already worked out how to achieve this. They just need the funds to roll out the promotional programs that are already working.

Unlike the US, Canada, Europe and Asia that are slow to uptake crypto George's team can sign up merchants quickly and easily with the system they have developed. They now have merchants going to them. They are developing some smart improvements on their merchant sign up protocol which I cannot discuss here but it is really exciting. The teams are learning and refining their process and they have regular meetings to share this information however what they want to do now is to greatly amplify their strategies to reach a much larger base.

George explained why South America is the perfect location for DASH adoption and gave reasons why it makes sense to invest first for achieving mass adoption in South America before any other countries:

1. Common language spoken making communications simple - 400 million people speak Spanish in South America and 207 Million speak Portuguese. That is only two languages we need to work with. That means training materials, knowledge and experience can easily be distributed with the minimum of effort. Unlike Asian and African countries that speak dozens of languages and dialects Spanish is understood everywhere. This breaks down the communication barriers.

2. Governments are weak in South America. They do not have the control that Asian countries have over their people. Africa have a chaotic government or in some countries no government at all. There needs to be an infrastructure for commerce to thrive. Not all African countries are the same however and some are more organized than others. However the African continent as a whole is diverse and not as easy for mass adoption as in South America. If the people want to use DASH the governments are unable to effectively stop them in South America and they all speak the same language with good internet infrastructure.

3. The Venezuelan Government passed a decree in Venezuela no only making the use of Crypto legal but actively encouraging its use. Unlike USA, Canada, UK and Asian and African countries (with the exception of Japan) crypto is still in the grey area and the general trend is resistance to its uptake. Laws are not yet clear and governments have not made their minds up.

4. People in South America are very welcoming to crypto currency. They actively want to take it up. Unlike in other countries of the world where there is no real desire by the masses to take up crypto currency. At the moment outside of Venezuela the people buying crypto are libertarians, geeks, anarchists and speculative investors. In places like Venezuela it is mums, dads, families, merchants and the whole population in general that are interested in taking up crypto.

5. Return on investment: We can employ 4 to 6 people in South America for the same price as on salary in the US. This hugely amplifies our return on investment investing in South America.

6. The benefits to the people are huge in South America. The people in places like Venezuela and Argentina have suffered unimaginable hardship with the hyperinflation. It is so easy to write one word "hyperinflation" but to fully experience what that is on a day to say basis is soul destroying. Imagine your hard earned money, or a pension savings disappearing in a few months. No money to pay for your children's food or education. No recourse, now place to complain or to get your money back. Your money just disappears. The people of Venezuela and Argentina and Brazil have suffered with this problem for decades. They are now hyper enthusiastic in owning a sound money that cannot be eroded away. If you compare that to the average person in the UK or US who does not really care that much (see comments below Ben Swann's Dash sponsored reports to see what I mean) .

7. Internet infrastructure: Unlike location such as Africa, South America has some of the strongest internet infrastructure in the world the main internet backbone feeds as you can see from this map of the internet routes and activity : https://www.telegeography.com/assets/website/images/maps/global-traffic-map-2010/global-traffic-map-2010-x.jpg South America has huge internet capacity and connectivity. These means mobile and internet is all they need to start using DASH.

The only barrier to entry to mass adoption in South America is education and funding. Unlike in other countries in which the barriers are considerably greater, with legal issue, Government issues, people not needing crypto etc.

South America is the lowest barrier entry continent in the World for DASH adoption. These teams just need the funds to scale up what they are already doing and we will have a DASH Continent.

George brings a valuable contribution to the Latin American team. He has a long track record in business and is a natural communicator. George also knows how to present the information in a way that we need to see it to be able to make decisions. He has a clear vision of how DASH mass adoption will happen and they have a clear objectives. They just need the funds.

Thank you, DeepBlue for your time and your support. It was a pleasure speaking with you yesterday.

YES 100%

Thanks for your support, Criticalinput!

Funded or not, we continue to recruit and guide new leaders and groups in Latin America, and of course to achieve the goals of our own respective proposals.

> An expanded and unforgettable identity for Dash as the leading digital cash in Latin America.

This sounds very vague. How can that be a milestone? How is that measured?

Thanks for the question!

It absolutely is vague, it is a big-picture goal, the rationale and thrust behind what we are doing here, and the way we get it is via the other more concrete milestones.

It will be measured based on the media coverage of what we are doing in Uruguay and across Latin America with the projects we are leading and guiding, as well as in the price of Dash and the change in tone and level of attention Dash receives from the greater crypto community.

Thrilled to answer more questions, thanks again!

I encourage MNOs to review the video "Dash LATAM Team Leaders Conference Call - Mass Adoption" presented on Rodrigo's Channel Dash Dinheiro Digital:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYUFeA0LpH0
Thank you!

Great team! Easy yes

Thanks for your support, Mastermined!

Hi MNO Community, This has been a great initiative of the Latin American Dash Community leaders, this helps show the strength of a united international community in efforts to expand Dash in Latin America. Please support as I’ll also be attending. Thanks

It's been great working with you on this, Rodrigo!

Great conference call we just had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYUFeA0LpH0

It makes more sense to invest in marketing DASH in countries where DASH is needed and the message is more receptive and where it can do more good than in countries in Europe and USA. Not only this we get considerably greater value for money since the labour is cheaper in South America.

Voting YES!

Unlike Africa, Latam has the reliable and high-quality electrical and internet access infrastructure needed for Dash mass adoption.

Unlike Asia, Latam is ruled by 26 fractured governments, none with the power to stop Dash mass adoption.

Latam also has the benefit of 400m people who speak the same language (Spanish) and another 200m who speak Portuguese.

Dash mass adoption is happening right now in Latin America.

Thanks for your support! I'd love to hear your ideas, too, as we are always on the lookout for ways to grow more effectively, sustainably and rapidly.

"Latam is ruled by 26 fractured governments, none with the power to stop Dash mass adoption." - The power of decentralised governments in Latam, but this applies globally. On global nation with a global govt would be a disaster.

Hello George, I have given some thought to your request on being more effective, sustainable and rapid.

Financial sustainability is probably one of the most important out of the three although attention could be given to all at the same time sometimes it is beneficial to focus on one to improve efficiency in it.

If the LATAM teams cannot sustain themselves financially during scale up then the model will not work. We need to develop a model of sustainability. In order to do that we need a model of scale up so that we know how much is required to grow. Have your team created a model for expansion? If so do you know yet how much money it would cost for all the LATAM countries you are working on to have converted to DASH. Do you also have a definition yet of "converted"? I think as a start a model needs to be developed for the entire conversion and then work out how the finances would work to achieve that. I think at the moment there are many small individual projects all working on small aspects of the problem. These are all valuable however there needs to be a global strategy worked out in order for all these smaller projects to have their effect. Presumably this is part of the objective of your proposal to work out that strategy and start implementing it.

One discipline that I do a lot and proves to be most valuable is to write out a goal or objective and then ask a series of questions to solve that issue. I then repeat the question over many times on the day and see what ideas come up. I have an app (called paperless) to record the response. I have found it is important to be able to capture the ideas in the moment and not wait until later, not even a few minutes, because the idea is lost for ever if I did this. I then capture all the ideas, even if they are not that good. I continue to do this until the ideas dry up. But I continue to ask the question or adapt the question to get better results. I then continue to ask the questions. Even if there is no reply I continue this discipline. Then inevitably something miraculous happens. I find a totally creative idea that I had never thought of before and often times many other ideas are connected to this. It is these later ideas that are often the most valuable and creative. I have used this procedure for many years and some of the ideas captured have been worth millions in returns but I would not have got to those ideas without exhausting the obvious ones first. If more than one person does this and they share their ideas at a meeting it is quite amazing what results can come from it.

My immediate thoughts on sustainability are to have a focus group on this subject and ensure that all teams share their knowledge of making any projects sustainable and to work on this each day. e.g. I was speaking with DASH youth about their training and I learned that in giving their lectures some parents and teachers wanted to pay for personal training. Although not completely sustainable this does hint that some people or businesses, who have the money, or can see the benefits are willing to pay for training. Perhaps a system can be developed whereby training is given for free however as the demand increases a prioritization system is created ? Then people or businesses could pay to be trained quicker than others.

A similar concept is found in PPC advertising where the highest bidder wins the highest position. Do you, and the other LATAM teams have a strategy for attracting companies and individuals that will pay for the training in order to be trained faster? If not this might be worth considering. If it could be visually displayed as well this could create a sense of competition where one company might be willing to bid more to be trained quicker than its competitors to gain a competitive advantage. Ideas such as these take time to evolve but there needs to be a system in place where some time is devoted each day to this task and the results shared with the teams in a systematic approach. Within a very short time period someone in the team will discover a means to make your projects self financially self sustaining and those opportunities may simply be waiting to be found. I have had this experience myself many times in the past. The solution to my problem was in fact staring me in the face for years however I always saw it as a problem, not an opportunity. The problem was the opportunity in disguise. Often times the bigger the problem the bigger the solution it gave. When I realised the opportunity I made more product sales in the last 3 months of my business than I did in the preceding 4.5 years. The revenue I made in those 3 months funded me for the next 3 years and my next business. Sometimes the problem is in fact the solution it just takes us some time to change our perspective and view it from a different angle to see it, and that is why I used this discipline to this day whenever I have a challenging situation to solve. I don't know if you are doing this already however I thought I would share this as maybe it could be helpful, as it has been for me. I know incentives are given to people to undertake actions however sometimes that can have negative consequences. In such circumstances people do not see the value of it unless they pay. Then there is a commitment also to make things work because there is an investment made, even if it is a small investment. Remember the story of Huckleberry Finn, how he re-framed the idea of painting a fence? In the end everyone want to do the work, originally however nobody wanted to do it. He used social proof and re-framing work to fun to make it work.

> there needs to be a global strategy worked out in order for all these smaller projects to have their effect

Absolutely. We are at an early stage here, learning new things daily, and I have no doubt that a successful and reproducible low-cost strategy will become obvious to us all within 6-12 months at the latest barring any further funding problems.

Some parts are clear to me already, including:

- merchant focus
- minimal full-time employees, maximum incentives-based compensation
- focus on unbanked, cash-using businesses in middle class and lower class areas
- unrelenting production of video and instagram content
- the humility to listen to the users and merchants and the courage to try walk the streets and try new things

> One discipline that I do a lot and proves to be most valuable is to write out a goal or objective

Amen. I journal. I write. I make videos. I bounce ideas off of people. I meditate. I run. I write down or voice memo dozens of ideas per day, especially on the way back home after promotional events or merchant marathons. In fact, I have a backlog of ideas to be processed on Dash Colombia alone.

Some of our best ideas so far have come from listening very carefully to new merchants and users during and after the wallet opening and dash spending process.

> that all teams share their knowledge of making any projects sustainable

This is the culture we have with Dash leaders in Latin America. For example, Eugenia and her team have been kind enough to keep open lines of communication with me and ideas pass among us all the time.

In fact, we created a Telegram group where 120 Latam Dash leaders communicate openly daily, sharing new ideas in a constructive and supportive environment.

https://t.me/DashAmericaLatina

Likewise, Angel, Eduardo and Adrian of Dash Argentina are people I talk to almost daily.

Rodrigo and Edward Stoever of Dash.red are two other wonderful Latin American leaders I am fortunate enough to exchange ideas with regularly.

There's even a Core developer here in Medellín who frequently makes time to attend our events, where he gathers real-world feedback from brand-new users on the wallets and general experience. He helped me, personally, get up to speed rapidly on the Android wallet.

I also had long conference calls with new Dash leaders recently in Paraguay, Colombia and Chile, as well as a team that is organizing in Mexico, where we exchanged ideas.

Most of us in Latam are in regular and productive communication.

> Do you, and the other LATAM teams have a strategy for attracting companies and individuals that will pay for the training in order to be trained faster?

Training in Dash quite frankly (for users and merchants) is easily handled with 10 minutes of one-on-one time and a series of videos that millions of people can watch on their own time while drinking coffee, riding the metro or relaxing at home.

Juan Usuga (my head of merchant adoption for Dash Colombia) and I rapidly learned that the meetup-centric (or conference-centric) model of growing new Dash communities is inefficient at best.

Once people learn how the wallets work, they can start engaging in commerce. The rest they will learn as they go via our bite-sized educational videos.

And during a 3h promotional event, we regularly bring 30-40 people (who are without any special level of educational attainment) up to speed on using Dash, not by addressing them as one huge group in a classroom setting but by working with them one on one or in small groups at a Dash-accepting merchant location.

> paying for training

Think about any B2B product, maybe a payment terminal, a computer, an app, anything. Would you walk into a business and say I have this great product for you but you have to pay me to learn about it?

In any case, Dash is very easy to use. Extensive training is not required. With small merchants, they are happily accepting payments in minutes.

Larger enterprises require POS software like the wonderful DAO-funded AnyPay, and we are still waiting on word as to when that will be available in Colombian Pesos and Spanish.

> He used social proof and re-framing work to fun to make it work

We're using similar techniques to draw people to events at merchant locations where they open wallets and immediately have the chance to spend some Dash, something that merchants are thrilled about.

We have merchants coming to us now about accepting Dash as a payment method, and in numbers so large, our 2-person team is having trouble keeping up.

The bottom line on funding is that:

- Latam is where mass adoption is going to happen first, so it's worth some funding.
- Dash Venezuela is at an intermediate stage but Dash Colombia and Dash Argentina are just barely getting started
- This is not the time to ration funding on new projects. New Latam leaders have been watching superstar project Dash Venezuela get denied funding 3 months in a row. They watched 14 community projects this cycle apparently waste a collective 70 dash over what appears to be a communications oversight.

This is the time to make a commitment to Latin America not just in terms of (reasonable) funding but in terms of attention and mentoring.

A note on funding amounts. You don't have to spend 200 dash per month forever on each and every Dash country. You can (depending on the Dash price) spend 25-40 dash per month and get excellent results when deploying a low-cost merchant-centric strategy that focuses on unbanked, medium and lower class business owners who work in the business and relies on a network of incentivized collaborators rather than full-time employees.

16 national Latam projects x 35 dash per month is 560 dash per month. This could be a reality within a year and it is only 9% of the budget.

Great care has to be taken to recruit, train and support good leaders who are excited about Dash and are willing to burn some shoe leather walking the streets and talking directly to potential new merchants at their places of business.

The projects that I am mentoring are focusing on the low-cost merchant-centric approach that Juan and I are pioneering here in Colombia.

Any team that has their "pilas puestas" (batteries plugged in) as we say here, will have a dozen solid business ideas within 12-24 months that will enable them to transition to for-profit business plans where it will be in their interests to continue promoting and support dash users and merchants, and treasury funding will not be a life-or-death matter anymore.

I have developed several ideas on this front over the last 6 weeks, and I may be ready to share some of them soon. We're still developing and testing them privately here for now.

On a side note, it is critical that new Dash projects are marketing-conscious because all of this, IMHO, needs to move the needle on the Dash price and we're only going to do that if we're marketing as we go, showing off our results.

If you have any ideas on how we can do that better, I'd love to hear them. Here is our YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjizxJYH0K7oYhW6gQ9iG4g

If you'd like to do a voice call with me, let me know at george@dashcolombia.org anytime.

Hello George, thanks for the link to your youtube channel. The merchants look delighted about accepting DASH and you are building up a good collection of videos. I've mentioned this to the DASH Merchants previously to post up hundreds of videos because this demonstrates first hand how easy it is to sign up merchants. These videos are not only useful to the DASH network to see your progress but also for other merchants to see how many merchants have been signed up.

I think one of the biggest challenges you face is getting your message across to the MNOs in a way they can see for themselves how effective these campaigns are in signing up merchants and how keen they are once they have signed up. I don't think MNOs fully appreciate this fact yet. Conversion of LATAM simply requires funds to scale up what you're doing and if only MNOs could see how effective, quick it is I think you, and the other teams would secure more funds.

If signing up a 2 or 3 merchants could be achieved in 1 month in the USA it would be hailed as a great achievement however your team and DASH HELP can easily do this in a few hours, and infact as you say you have more merchants than you can handle now because they are coming to you. I don't see that happening in USA, UK or Canada any time soon.

Your main challenge is getting the message across in a demonstrable way so that you can get the funds. There is practically no barrier to entry in South America.

I don't understand MNOs spending huge sums trying to get into highly regulated industries such as the Cannabis industry when the money would be better spent in LATAM making hundreds of thousands of conversions easily and quickly without resistance and with minimal barriers to entry. If the whole of Latin America converted to DASH that would give substantial strength to DASH and we could then go into the more difficult industries later, however for some reason MNOs are willing to spend years and huge sums of DASH fighting the system to get into extremely difficult industries with a lot of regulation. To me that does not make much sense. They may well achieve it eventually but by then we could have converted all of South America to DASH, then have the resources and stability to tackle the more complex difficult markets. We really ought to focus our time, money and energy on the low hanging fruit, where is it considerably easier to get established and there are very low barriers to entry. South American countries really ought to be our focus of efforts to get results for DASH now and that is where our funding should go.

I have got your email and will send you a message this week to arrange a call to discuss further. Perhaps I can give the perspective from an MNO which may help in your fund raising campaigns.

Wonderful. I look forward to your email.

I think your strategy is right on. So far, I have been making weekly MNO reports summarizing our results, and sharing them to reddit, discord, twitter and other places where MNOs can see them:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL92ognmkx-f6vnKSRgTyKKJkdeLytsAi_

I would love to put subtitles on every video I make, but I just don't have the resources for it at this time.

DFN wrote an article about the conference we held for Dash Latam leaders last month:

https://www.dashforcenews.com/latin-american-leadership-forum-hashes-out-expansion-strategies/

And I thought we'd scheduled a podcast session with them for the top Latam leaders, but they decided they aren't interested in interviewing people who have proposals in front of the DAO.

We're doing an interview with Rodrigo tonight at 10PM Central time (Chicago time) with the discord. And we're starting a Dash Latam Podcast every Thursday at 7P Colombia time that will be livestreamed on YouTube and be in English for the first 10 to 15 minutes:

https://www.meetup.com/DashColombia/events/hdhpzpyxkbzb/

We in Latam definitely need to do a better job of marketing ourselves to the DAO and we're taking steps to improve. Ideas are always welcome! Thanks!

Have you perhaps tried speak to @craigmason I can't say if he would agree to do an unpaid interview or not but I think he believes in what we are doing in Venezuela and he has undertaken interviews for DASH HELP and DASH Merchants. He might be willing to do a short interview. Perhaps speak with AlejandroE to see how he got the interview setup.

I would like to see Craigmason back doing the interviews for the proposals it made it much easier for MNOs to learn more about the proposal owners themselves. DashWatch written reports are good but the video format of Craig's interviews gives us a feel of what the proposal owners are like and what their background is.

I just wrote him on the Dash forums. I'll let you know if I hear back from him.

Very interesting reply George and most helpful. I've read several of your other replies here and in other places. From these replies I can see you have clearly some form of business acumen. Would you mind giving a little detail of your background in a general, non specific manner. If you could share this type of info it would be helpful for me and others so I can modulate my response according to your experience.

Absolutely, very kind of you to ask.

I've got experience in sales, investment banking, teaching, web development, *nix systems administration, digital marketing, forming and running international businesses, as a copywriter, blogger, content creator, story coach, science fiction author and liberty activist.

I've had success in developing networks of people and systems to achieve innovative goals.

I'm from the US but lived in Japan for 4 years and have been living full time in Colombia for 17 years, 24 years total experience with Colombia and Latin America.

I started and ran a tech company for 10 years with 500 customers in 40 countries.

I've been doing digital marketing for 20 years.

I'm at near-native fluency in Spanish.

I've been involved in crypto since 2011. I hosted one of the first conferences (online) where there where presentations about bitcoin.

I believe the time has come to make crypto mass adoption happen, that Latin America is the place for it and Dash is the coin for it. I'm cultivating leaders across Colombia and the region.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgedonnelly/

Thank you George.

I have had the privilege to meet every member of this team, each one a proven asset to the Dash community. The idea of this project originally came from Angel Arri of Dash Argentina. This proposal is the result of many hours of team work! George Donnelly has worked particularly hard to fine tune the proposal for maximum impact at a low cost to the DAO.

I strongly support this initiative with my YES vote and my recommendation for other MNOs to vote YES.

Thank you for your support!

Hello, everyone.

So far, it has been a pleasure to work with this highly professional team, commited to make of Dash the greatest cryptocurrency in Latam.

I expect nothing but high ROI and high quality results and reports fram this super team.

I invite the Master Node Owners to read and get to know the members of this team and their achievements so far before voting (hopefully YES)

Thank you!

It has been wonderful working on this project with you, Eugenia, and I hope to continue working with you on it indefinitely.

Well done, so i hope Masternode will understand the importance of building community and Dash as a community crypto need to build community around the world, so it is very important that we work like that as people in Africa are doing it so i hope a long life of this project and i am already ready to collaborate in Haiti and the caraibean country for the expansion of Dash Latam.

Thanks for your comment. (Carlo is the leader of Dash Haiti.)