This is an opinion editorial by Santiago Varela, a bitcoin miner and writer from Mexico City.
My sister turned 18 at the beginning of 2023 and I gave her a very unusual gift this holiday season. Because I love her, I really think the best gift I can give her is the orange pill.
It all started with a letter I wrote to him explaining the gift I was about to give him. So I handed him a copy of “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous and a hardware wallet. However, that was just the beginning of a long process that we had to go through together if he really wanted to give her the orange pill.
Of course, I knew very well that her first reaction to my surprise was not going to be the typical face of an 18-year-old girl opening her presents on a joyous Christmas morning. At first, she seemed more confused than excited. I have no doubt that she expected a good pair of shoes or a cool gadget. sorry sister but this is how we shoot maximalists.
In the birthday/holiday letter, I noted three reasons why I was giving this specific gift:
- I want to put her on the path to financial freedom.
- I want her to be a sovereign woman in a trust world where dishonest relationships have been normalized.
- As a high school senior who doesn’t know what he wants to study in college, you could benefit from Bitcoin, which could give you some ideas about what you want to do.
The long process of taking my sister’s orange pills began with a quote from the foreword to “The Bitcoin Standard”: which I consider the perfect starting point. I asked him to read this quote over and over again before beginning the orange pill journey:
“This book does not offer investment advice, but is intended to help elucidate the economic properties of the network and how it works, to give readers an informed understanding of bitcoin before deciding whether to use it. Only with such an understanding, and only after thorough and thorough investigation of the practical operational aspects of owning and storing bitcoins, should someone consider holding bitcoin value. While bitcoin’s rising market value may make it seem like an obvious investment, a closer look at the myriad of hacks, attacks, scams, and security flaws that have cost people their bitcoins provides a sobering warning for anyone. who thinks that owning bitcoins provides a guaranteed profit. If you leave this book thinking that bitcoin is something worth owning, your first investment should not be in buying bitcoin, but instead in spending time understanding how to safely buy, store, and own bitcoin. It is the inherent nature of bitcoin that such knowledge cannot be delegated or outsourced. There is no alternative to personal liability for anyone interested in using this network, and that is the real investment that must be made to get into Bitcoin.”
In the letter, I told her that I would help her set up the hardware wallet and that I would send her some bitcoin. To start with, I sent him $10 worth of bitcoins. But then, to make sure that she invested time in acquiring the necessary basic knowledge and for her to understand the philosophy of proof of work, I promised her that I would send her $100 in bitcoins for each chapter of the book that she read. . Therefore, I prepared a questionnaire for each chapter to verify that she really read carefully.
However, as someone deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, I knew that making her read the book to rack up sats in her hardware wallet wasn’t enough. That was nothing, we were just getting started. So what was next on the orange pelleting journey? Every time I came across an opportunity, I tried to turn that moment into a little bitcoin lesson.
For example, there was such an opportunity after my sister was assigned a project in her high school philosophy class. Knowing that I am a big fan of philosophy, she came to me for help. The project consisted of having a conversation with one of your relatives but using the famous Socratic method for conversation. If you don’t know what that is, the socratic method (named after Socrates) is “a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and extract underlying ideas and assumptions.”
Obviously, we had a dialogue about Bitcoin and money using the Socratic method.
Another thing I did on this orange pelleting journey was to show you a rabbit hole within the Bitcoin rabbit hole: bitcoin mining and energy. I love bitcoin mining and the energy aspects of Bitcoin. In fact, I love it so much that we have a ASIC in our garage. It wasn’t really hard to make him understand how passionate I am about home mining. Believe it or not, I hadn’t even seen my ASIC (just heard the “brrrrrr”). Accordingly, I took her to the garage and she got some hands on experience. I also have my Bitcoin and Lightning nodes in the garage. That was really fun because with tools like Mempool.Space Y LnDisplayer I was able to help her see the tangible side of Bitcoin. That’s when I really felt like everything started to come together.
As everyone probably knows, Bitcoin knowledge cannot be delegated or outsourced. When it comes to Bitcoin, there is no alternative to personal responsibility. Even though I told her I’d love to help her with anything, I can’t lead her down the rabbit hole forever. You have to go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole yourself. I guided her for a long time, but the time has come for her to embark on the journey. What Oscar Wilde once said: “Education is an admirable thing. But it is good to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.”
So, I started treating her like any other Bitcoin commoner and let her go down the rabbit hole on her own. All I did was send him a bunch of means (articles, podcasts, videos, books, etc.) and let her go her own way. At the same time, I realized that I could do this with other children the same age as my sister. Even better, I realized my sister could help me with this and introduce her digital native friends to Bitcoin because if you care about Bitcoin, you have to onboard people individually.
Consequently, I have decided to convert our garage into a small bitcoin academy. Although my sister was the guinea pig for this experiment (and, as of this writing, she is the only student to have attended the Bitcoin academy), I must congratulate other Bitcoiners around the world who have shared educational content for anyone to use. For example, my first bitcoin (from El Salvador) has an incredible Bitcoin Diploma Workbook that anyone can download for free. I have no doubt that initiatives like yours or like bitcoin school in Uruguay they are what we need if we want a future with sovereign individuals. We need to teach the young.
Hopefully this will inspire other Bitcoiners around the world to introduce Bitcoin to their little brothers. I was inspired by initiatives like the ones mentioned above and stories like the one about Denver high school students who became Bitcoin entrepreneurs. Hopefully, the next time I write an article for Bitcoin Magazine, it will be about Mexico City high school students who became Bitcoin entrepreneurs. For now stay humble and stack sats my friends.
This is a guest post by Santiago Varela. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
