Ever since my wife and I purchased our home, we have been long considering installing solar panels on the roof to do our little bit towards tilting the energy mix towards a renewable focus. These sorts of little adjustments start to become front and centre thoughts when you have children that you realise that you are going to be passing the future to!

Anyway, due to the construction of the roof and the plans that we had for expanding the attic room, it didn't make sense to install solar before doing renovations. I had first heard of the
Sun Exchange several years ago on the Unchained podcast, and it seemed like an interesting way to invest in solar crowd-sales for worthy South African projects whilst leasing out the power/cells and being paid in Bitcoin (BTC) over the lifetime of the cells. So, in short... fiat in, Bitcoin out and supporting a South African school or industry! Sounds fine to me...

Now, you can choose to have your lease be paid over the 20 year lease period in South African Rand (ZAR) or Bitcoin (BTC). Let's just say that I have very little use for ZAR and so I opted for Bitcoin... after all, this was one of the visions that cryptocurrency was supposed to address... the ability to do easy and low cost cross-border transactions and investments!

Over the course of the bear markets of the past couple of years, I had invested in a number of projects... mostly schools and sustainable light industry/agriculture, whilst avoiding the heavy industry and commercial crowd-sales. Those were the types projects that really appealed to my interests: education and sustainable development/production.

So, over the bear market in the cryptocurrency sector... I was repaid with a steady drip of Bitcoin from these solar investments in a far-off country.... and now that we are in a bullish market, the value of those returns have been multiplied with the rise of the Bitcoin price. A few weeks back, I had talked with my wife about what to do with these "profits" as they were still being held in custody by the Sun Exchange.

One slightly irritating thing about the Sun Exchange is the fact that the Bitcoin withdrawal fees are relatively high compared to regular cryptocurrency exchanges. Plus, they don't really offer any real alternatives for fast and cheap withdrawals... so, Bitcoin it will have to be. I wish they at least offered pegged Bitcoin tokens or Lightning options.

So, partly due to the fact that the fees were high and the fact that we wanted to still help out in our own little way... we reinvested all the returned lease money into another solar project that had just launched. This time it was a school... actually, yet another school!

So, sometimes investing isn't just about ROI and profits... sometimes it is just a nice way to return something back to society and the future. For us, it is a little way of investing in a different country, with the profits going towards making a slightly better Earth of the future for our children. Not things that are tangible... but profits to us none the less!

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.