Company Name: My First bitcoin
Founder: John Dennehy
Foundation date: August 2021
Headquarters Location: The Savior
Amount of bitcoin held in Treasury: About 0.5 btc
Number of employees: twenty-one
Website: https://miprimerbitcoin.io/
Public or Private? Private (non-profit)
John Dennehy wants to change the world and believes that bitcoin education is a means to do so.
Dennehy sees bitcoin as a tool to help people regain control of their lives and understands that education is essential to helping people use this tool.
So in late 2021, he created a bitcoin educational platform called bitcoin/”>My First bitcoin (My First bitcoin) as a means to empower ordinary Salvadorans.
He believes that for the bitcoin revolution to truly succeed, bitcoin users must thoroughly understand the technology they interact with.
“Education will naturally reject any attempt to co-opt the revolutionary spirit of bitcoin,” Dennehy told bitcoin Magazine.
And while Dennehy doesn't hesitate to think that broader bitcoin adoption is anything less than a revolution, keep in mind that his approach is more like Gandhi's and less like Guevara's.
Dennehy is a soft-spoken, introspective and kind-hearted person who is remarkably thoughtful in his approach.
The inspiration for My First bitcoin
At the beginning of 2021, like many of us during the COVID lockdowns, Dennehy was concerned about how helpless people felt and wanted to do something about it.
“I was in New York during the pandemic and spent a lot of time taking long walks contemplating the state of the world and the direction society was headed,” Dennehy said.
“My conclusion was that the root of the problem was that we had lost agency collectively, we had lost sovereignty (the individual had lost agency in his own life) and that had many negative second and third order effects,” he added.
“The solution was education about bitcoin. The solution was to attract more people to bitcoin and do it in a way that empowers them and encourages them to think for themselves, to think critically and to take control of their own lives and their own future.”
Riding the wave of inspiration, Dennehy booked a flight to Ecuador, a country he had previously lived in and a place that was “underserved by the current system,” as he put it, to begin his bitcoin educational mission.
A first attempt
Dennehy arrived in Ecuador in June 2021. There he tried to educate his friends about bitcoin, but had difficulty getting people together in person due to the pandemic. Without in-person meetings, he found it difficult to connect with people.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” Dennehy said of his experience in Ecuador.
However, while in Ecuador, Dennehy learned of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele's announcement that bitcoin would become legal tender in El Salvador.
After snapping out of his near-disbelief, Dennehy booked his next flight, a one-way ticket to El Salvador, to help the country make history.
“I decided to sell my possessions and get a one-way ticket to El Salvador to see how I could help make it a success,” Dennehy said. “As the first nation in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, for better or worse, El Salvador was going to be an example to the world, and I thought it was of utmost importance that it be a good example.”
humble beginnings
Dennehy landed in El Salvador and quickly wrote My First bitcoin mission status as well as some lesson plans. He also began recruiting both students and teachers.
“The tactic was to talk to every Salvadoran I met (the Uber driver, the waitress at the restaurant, the person next to me waiting to cross the street) about bitcoin,” Dennehy said.
“Before the first class, there were a couple of meetings of this very random group of people. “They came to my Airbnb and talked about (bitcoin) as a group,” he recounted.
“Of that group, a couple of people would volunteer for the project.”
Despite his years of experience as an ESL teacher and cycling instructor, Dennehy knew from the beginning that he was not the right person to teach the program he intended to create. Instead, he wanted the locals to play that role.
“From the beginning, one of the fundamental concepts was that it should be community-led, meaning that teachers should be able to relate to their students in a way that I never could,” Dennehy explained. “So, as a strict rule, all teachers here in El Salvador are Salvadorans.”
The first class was held in a yoga studio between classes and was attended by a total of one student. But by the end of the first month, a total of five had attended classes, which were held either in the yoga studio itself or in cafes or restaurants.
Developing the Mi Primer bitcoin “bitcoin Diploma” program
In February 2022, Dennehy and the growing My First bitcoin team began creating a proper curriculum, which he would call his bitcoin-Diploma-2024″>“bitcoin Diploma” program.
“We go through calendar year 2022 with three versions (of the program),” Dennehy said.
“We were iterating very quickly. We didn’t start building it until February and the third version was finished in September,” she added.
Dennehy also shared that student feedback on what worked and what didn't greatly influenced the process.
In speaking with Dennehy, I got the impression that developing a curriculum was not one of the biggest challenges the organization had faced.
The challenges of running My First bitcoin
A persistent challenge that Mi Primer bitcoin has faced since its inception has been establishing the independence and impartiality of the nonprofit organization.
Dennehy analyzed how many Salvadorans associate bitcoin with the Salvadoran government, an institution about which many in the country have polarized feelings.
“From the beginning, here in El Salvador there was a strong partnership with the government and bitcoin,” Dennehy said.
“People who liked government used to like bitcoin. People who didn't like the government didn't like bitcoin. There were even people who thought that Nayib Bukele invented bitcoin. That was a common perception in these early days,” he added.
“So there is a strong association that bitcoin had with the government. One of the first struggles was to show people that bitcoin is separate. bitcoin is independent. And so do we.”
Dennehy noted that this challenge still persists, especially since Mi Primer bitcoin now operates within El Salvador's public school system.
“We always try to assert our independence and not only with facts, but also with perception,” he explained.
“Working with the government simply amplifies the challenge of separating ourselves from the government in the perception of others,” he added.
“One of the ways we face that first challenge of not depending on the government is, as a matter of principle. “We never accept government funding.”
Another challenge Mi Primer bitcoin faces is keeping its 21 employees paid through a donation-based system, a challenge that is amplified by the fact that the organization does not accept donations that come with strings attached.
“We turn down most sponsorship offers,” Dennehy said. “We reject four out of five sponsorship offers, because four out of five come with conditions.”
However, notable institutions in the bitcoin space have begun to ease some of the financial burden of My First bitcoin.
“We receive subsidies from HRF, OpenSats and Block”Dennehy said.
“They all come with no strings attached, which is great,” he added.
“I think grants could start to take up a bigger piece of the pie, but from the beginning until now, most of our funding has come from grassroots support.”
My First bitcoin goes global
My First bitcoin educational materials and curriculum are bitcoin-Diploma-2024?tab=readme-ov-file”>free to download and use. This has made it easier for teachers around the world to adopt the nonprofit's curriculum.
And Mi Primer bitcoin also supports its international professors who lead bitcoin educational efforts in their respective home countries, members of Mi Primer bitcoin whom the organization refers to as “Nodes of light.”
“We have 33 nodes in 22 countries and we all come together and share best practices,” Dennehy explained.
“Maybe a professor in Argentina is a guest professor for a project that started in Colombia. We have a node in Cuba and a node in the Dominican Republic, and in fact they are co-teaching,” he added.
When I asked Dennehy how fast the My First bitcoin model is spreading on a scale of one to 10, he responded with a “10,” without hesitation. He also noted that trying to expand Mi Primer bitcoin more quickly would only derail the institution from its mission.
“I think the only way this will spread faster is if we compromise our values, if we centralize and dictate instead of decentralize and empower,” Dennehy said.
“We are trying to reimagine what is possible for the next generation and that often means we have to forge a new path. If we try to teach others that a different future is possible, we must prove it ourselves,” he added.
“What you say is not important, what you do is everything.”
Dennehy went on to explain that My First bitcoin has received 4 Light Node applications in the last 48 hours and that he is surprised by how quickly things are accelerating.
Never in his wildest dreams had he seen My First bitcoin grow so quickly.
“I'm a dreamer. I'm an idealist. That's why I'm here,” Dennehy said. “But if you had told me two and a half years ago that we would have taught tens of thousands of students in person and that we would have inspired and helped facilitate this in dozens of other countries, I would say, 'No way'. Maybe in about 10 years.'”
Stay mission driven
As My First bitcoin moves forward, Dennehy believes the organization must continue to emulate bitcoin itself if it wants to remain true to its mission of empowering others.
“Everything we do at My First bitcoin, we try to learn from bitcoin itself,” Dennehy shared. “And decentralization is really important to us, because we want to empower others rather than control them.”
And his vision for what this empowerment looks like seems to be more refined than ever.
“bitcoin education is a means to an end, and that end is empowerment,” Dennehy said.
“Once you realize that you have control over your money, that you could have more control over your present, the incentive structure changes. In the fiduciary world, we are not discouraged from looking to the future, from building, from creating, because the rules of the game could change. I could start a business today, but the rules of the game that will greatly influence whether it succeeds or not are not up to me and could change at any time. So it encourages us to be followers and not leaders,” he explained.
“bitcoin is something that flips a switch that says 'Okay, I could have more control of my money, which gives me more control of my present, which makes it easier to build toward the future, because I'm not dependent on whims.' someone else.' The more we can get involved in defining our own destiny, the more we will be encouraged and incentivized to look to the future: to build and create, and bitcoin education is the means to that end.”
