My First Bitcoin Promotes Two Rising Stars
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador, September 16 — My First Bitcoin recently celebrated its third birthday, and the movement continues to mature. It is now old enough to start to see…
Independent educators are changing the world. They unite once a month in a General Assembly of the Node Network, an initiative from My First Bitcoin, to create a thriving ecosystem of educators around the banner of “independent, impartial, bitcoin-only and community-led bitcoin education”. The GA from July 25 was attended by 19 individuals!
Welcome to this fourth write-up of all progress that has been made in the past month. Welcome to the stories from 8 countries!
The General Assembly was planned during the Nashville conference, which caused a lower attendance than normal. But at the same time, several nodes from the network came together during the Bitcoin Educators Unconference, that took place on July 24.
Project leads from the USA, Suriname and Haiti attended this unique event, together with 150 other high-signal bitcoin educators from all over the world!
Together with students at his school, Huxley fromo BPUK created an art piece. Everyone was off timetable and 140 students did a project in collaboration with the Turing Trust. They take computers from businesses to the UK and ship it to several countries in Africa.
These computers can be a liability for businesses, and it can be used for bitcoin nodes, for example. Huxley created a great artwork with the face of the famous and legendary Alan Turing, created from cypher wheels. The students learned about cryptography, and they had to decipher instructions as they dove into this topic.
Huxley also introduced a game called “Byzantine Tag” to the nodes: students are broken up in groups and they had to “attack” another group at a specific time. One person is a spy, and every group has a messenger that tried to hear about strategies of other groups and the time of the planned “attack”.
After the role-play game, the groups had to find consensus. The students learned that it’s very hard to find consensus in this information-sharing-network, which led them to understand the Byzantine Generals Problem and how bitcoin introduced a solution to this.
“We weren’t explicitly teaching about bitcoin, but discussed underlying topics like cryptography, privacy and the Byzantine General Problem.”
Besides graduating the last cohort, there are not many noteworthy updates coming from Canada. All focus for the team, led by Jaime Garcia, is on starting a new cohort in September, after the summer break.
“We want to support a local teacher who has been approved to start teaching the My First Bitcoin curriculum and financial literacy classes to high school students. It’s geared towards hands-on students, not so much for academic students. We want to empower them with financial literacy on top of their trades.”
The students will learn about proof-of-work, bitcoin, the history of money, and similar topics. “We’re ready to support this new teacher as soon as he’s ready to start,” Jaime added.
The third (of five) Full Nodes is Mi Primer Bitcoin, located on the ground in El Salvador.
There are three ongoing online groups with classes taught by MPB teachers. Additionally, new Bitcoin Diploma classes have started in Metapan (thanks to a donation from Volcano Energy) and a cohort in Ilopango. This last group will be part of a graduation ceremony around the Adopting Bitcoin Conference in November in Bitcoin Country, totaling 270 students.
The training of public school teachers continues, along with visits to these schools, as part of the collaboration with the Ministry of Education (MINED).
The new community platform for the Node Network is a work in progress, as is the online Learning Management System (LMS). It allows the creation of digital classrooms for all nodes; the first tests are ongoing with Felix from The Core.
Finally, the Salvador team successfully held the 3rd Educators Unconference in Nashville, with a total of 150 high-signal attendees.
The first Light Node update is coming from Zambia: The project finished its second cohort with a total of 13 graduates, bringing their total number of alumni to 21. The third cohort will start on September 6, and the team purchased a projector to enable informational sessions at the meetup location, in addition to their classroom.
The remote team of the project is also preparing more than a dozen smartphones to be sent to Zambia. Project lead Adam shares a tip on setting up a Voltage lightning node:
“It allows for self-custody, and it helps as a secondary node that you can connect to an already existing lightning node in the project.”
YesBitcoin hosted the first meetup in Grande-Rivière-du-Nord. The local talented bitcoin educator Milfort Estève Mikerlange explains:
“We have successfully obtained permission to use Institution Mixte Marie-Rose Estève as the dedicated center for Bitcoin Education. In collaboration with Yves Bennaïm, we are receiving guidance on establishing a circular economy. Additionally, we have purchased Starlink and shipped the initial packages from the US and Mexico to support our connectivity needs.”
The teachers are currently preparing the schedule and dates for our first cohort of students, as they are also in a teacher training program with full node Huxley. The interest among students is high!
As part of the initiative of YesBitcoin, the Blink Wallet vouchers are now also available in Haitian Gourdes, the local currency of Haiti.
Armand added:
“I attended the Unconference yesterday. It’s been awesome, I went up on stage with how many other people to talk about what everyone was doing with Bitcoin Education. It was incredible! I hope I can meet all of you one day, and reconnect in-person.”
The focus of BitcoinMtaani in Nairobi shifted this past month from bitcoin education to a broader topic that’s a big issue in Kenya: the tax hikes.
“It takes 100% of my time. Bitcoin is freedom, but we first must fight for our own freedom before we can even start to speak about bitcoin. Besides going to the street and demonstrating against the Finance Bill, we should also talk about bitcoin as an alternative in the country.”
Two new ladies are joining the BitcoinMtaani team part-time. “The next step is to create videos explaining the Bitcoin Diploma, in English by my (MasterGuantai, red.), and the two students will work on translating it into Swahili. It’s extremely important to bring it to that language too.
“In Tanzania alone, there are already 50 million people using Swahili in their day-to-day communications. They do not have the luxury to learn from What Bitcoin Did or other podcasts. The Bitcoin Diploma is open source and available in chapters.”
On the island of Roatan, AmityAge is giving “free bitcoin education to kids.” New teacher Fidel explains:
“The coolest thing we’re doing at the moment is a project called Miners4Kids. We donate miners to the kids, and the proceeds go to the kids who learned the most through the Yzer apps. In that way, they earn sats through learning. We started implementing this after BTC Prague and started a Geyser Fund for the electricity.”
The team estimated donations for three months of electricity, but they raised enough to mine until January next year.
Bitcoin Africa Story is a brand-new node in the network. Under the lead of teacher Destiny Smart, they just started with their first classes!
“It finished the registration for students, and is already at Chapter 2 of the Bitcoin Diploma! We have gotten 8 students already. Daniel, a project partner, started to onboard a merchant and he’s also joining the class.”
If you are a community leader and bitcoin educator and want to be part of the Node Network, check out our GitHub page.
If you want to use our open source Bitcoin Diploma workbook, you can! It’s available on GitHub as well.
For any questions about the Node Network or any other international collaboration, feel free to reach out to Arnold Hubach (arnold@miprimerbitcoin.io).
