About PoWBoT
What It Does
PoWBoT is a Telegram bot that verifies and rewards Proof of Work (PoW) – real-world evidence of Bitcoin adoption happening on the ground in Africa.
Here's how it works:
- A project submits a link to an X or Nostr post showing a Bitcoin payment at a local merchant
- The bot automatically verifies the post meets basic criteria
- A human reviewer watches the video and approves or rejects
- If approved, the bot sends sats via Lightning to the merchant, the project, and the reviewer
- The post is liked and reposted on Nostr to amplify the signal
The bot serves the CBAF – a network of 42 grassroots Bitcoin projects across Africa, and growing.
The Origin Story
The Telegram bot was built by someone with no programming experience.
It started in December 2025 with a simple message to Grok: "Help me write a basic Telegram bot."
Over the following weeks, the project evolved from a bare-minimum welcome message into a full-featured Proof of Work verification system – first with Grok, then continued with Claude.
Built With
- Python + python-telegram-bot
- SQLite (payment ledger)
- Blink API (Lightning payments)
- Nostr SDK (likes, reposts)
- Google Sheets API (tracking)
- BTCMap API (merchant data)
- Twitter Syndication API (X posts)
- mempool.space API (block countdown)
- GitHub Pages (dashboard hosting)
