Henrique Albuquerque

Henrique Albuquerque is a developer and educator working at the intersection of technology, economics and individual liberty. As head of education at FREE Madeira he teaches people to use Bitcoin for savings and everyday payments through workshops and multi-week courses, contributing to the financial literacy and self-sovereignty of Madeira’s population. He also works on open-source projects and Monstera Media.

FREE Madeira runs Bitcoin education in Portuguese for the island’s own residents rather than for visiting enthusiasts, from a monthly meetup to multi-week courses, and it publishes its teaching materials openly so that other communities can reuse them. Albuquerque builds and runs that programme.

The setting is unusual. Madeira is an autonomous region of Portugal inside the European Union, so it cannot make bitcoin legal tender, and the strategy is instead adoption: merchants who accept it, residents who understand it, and an island known for it. The regional government has backed the effort in public.

His starting point as a developer is that adoption is a usability problem before it is a policy one. People do not fail to use bitcoin because they oppose it, but because nobody has shown them how to receive a payment or keep a key safe.