My First Bitcoin is built around a core concept: that independent, impartial, community-led Bitcoin education will change the world.
This isn't about Bitcoin, but rather what Bitcoin will teach us: critical thought, personal responsibility and ultimately self-sovereignty. It teaches us to lower our time preference and look further into the future—and that changes everything. When we have control over our lives and future, it encourages us to build and plan
When used correctly Bitcoin is a tool that empowers individuals to make their own decisions and as educators introducing new people to the space it is extremely important that we never dictate to students but rather allow them to come to their own conclusions. In many ways this is the path of most-resistance, but empowerment is our mission.
Cooption* is our enemy, and we will have to constantly confront it.
Fiercely resisting outside influence—from sponsors, governments or anyone else—will be difficult. It will mean that we will decline many opportunities and face extra challenges.
But we must teach HOW to think, not WHAT to think.
Even while we grow, we must always strive for quality. In fact, quality is MORE important than quantity. This means we need to always iterate and improve upon our offerings as well as always strive to improve ourselves. We need to be self-critical.
*the act or process of being assimilated or taken over by a larger or more established group.
Bitcoin can be humanity’s first revolution. In every previous ‘revolution’ we have fought over who has power, we now have a chance to change our very relationship with power.
As we grow, we will make a lot of mistakes and learn a lot of lessons. We must build new systems and trailblaze new paths.
When we open-source* everything—not just educational materials but things like accounting, media, communication and even how we make decisions internally—then it will be much easier for anyone, anywhere to copy or iterate upon our template.
While we seek to create new systems and open-source everything, we are also building out a global decentralized communication layer—a network of nodes. In order to join each node must agree to the consensus rules—that their education must be: independent; impartial; community-led, high-quality; Bitcoin-only; and teach empowerment.
We are more than the sum of our parts and this network is a proof-of-concept for how the world could be—transforming what began as a local project into a global movement.
This is a serious attempt to replace the existing order and making the status quo irrelevant. There will be resistance.
Diffusing the core ideas in a way that is efficient, decentralized and international will make it extremely resilient. Once something becomes unstoppable, it becomes inevitable.
We are building an unstoppable machine.
*open source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint.
By focusing solely on independent, impartial, community-led education, and doing so with complete transparency, we can create a common ground that everyone can support.
People come at Bitcoin from diverse perspectives, but, like Bitcoin itself, we want to encourage collaboration over competition.
There are lots of other great projects doing wonderful things but because our geographic vision is so broad (the world) we need to maintain a narrow focus on what we do. If it’s not Bitcoin education, then we will leave the task to others.
This common ground, that is difficult to oppose and easy to unite behind, manifests itself by creating an advisory board of all the diverse industry leaders and creating a common table. This will also lend legitimacy, which will allow the network to grow even faster. This will incentivize industry leaders to be involved and create a positive feedback loop.