Interactive Strategies to Improve as a Bitcoin Educator | Bitcoin 2026

All right, we'll let the crowd simmer down for a second. We'll do some intros in the meantime. Um, so in this session, we're going to be talking about how to be a be a better Bitcoin educator, right? Like we're we're constantly on this mission of trying to get Bitcoin out there to our to our different communities. Um, and I'm joined by by three amazing uh panelists and friends who have who I've known for several years now. Um, I'll just start with my introduction. I'm I'm Arsh. I um run operations and our education program at the Human Rights Foundation and I'm also the co-founder of the Bitcoin Students Network. Um and I'll let I'll let Nifty and John and and Stacy introduce themselves as well. >> Thanks, Arish. Um hey everyone, I'm Lisa. I also go by Nifty professionally. Um I run a couple projects. Bitcoin++ which is a developer conference series. Um more on the education side. I have a nonprofit which is really focused on technical education for Bitcoiners, particularly developers, but also, you know, STEM education workshops for classrooms and corporates. Um, and that's called the Base 58 School of Engineering. >> Hey, my name is John Denhei and I'm the founder of My First Bitcoin. So, we're a Bitcoin education nonprofit. We started in El Salvador in 2021. Um, and now we've transitioned to an international footing and we support and help educators and education projects in 40 countries around the world with open source materials, frameworks, and templates. >> Hi everyone, I'm Satsy. I lead up the Bitcoin Dev Project. We are a developer outreach initiative creating tools and education for not only existing Bitcoin developers, but for anyone that wants to get more involved in the space. >> Yeah. And I'll also add that um you know we'll we'll we'll have some questions up here for the first half, but you all will also have a chance to ask the panel some questions as well. Um the back half. Um the first question I think we we can go in the same order, right? Like I mentioned earlier, we've we've known each other a few years now. I've seen y'all's projects just succeed and you know the the amazing work that you guys do, but what's been like one key challenge in in in scaling um your your education initiatives? >> Yeah, I mean I think for me it's definitely figuring out how to get funding. Um you know, creating the curriculum is the fun part. So coming up with what to teach is really fun. Um getting people involved as volunteers has been great. We've got some really amazing volunteers that are helping out with base 58, particularly on our like workshop education side of it. Um, but it would be really amazing, I think, to figure out how to get to kind of the next leg up would be finding the right grants or kind of tuition program for what we're doing such that we can scale and bring people on more full-time um to be able to just get more people learning about how Bitcoin works. Yeah, similar um probably a common problem in the space, right? I mentioned that we're a nonprofit. Um funding is an issue. So, we've been around, we're coming up on five years now, and for the first couple of years, we were all uh only accepted donations and and volunteer-based, which was amazing. It means that you have people who are really dedicated, their hearts in it, but they have other priorities maybe, right? So now in order to really scale and be more professional, you have to pay people a decent salary. You have to, you know, you have to pay the rent, right, in order to to scale up and and that takes a lot of time to get there. It took us 5 years to get to the point that we're at now. Like if if money was easier, maybe we could have done it a little bit faster. Um, so that's always an issue. And funding for for me I think is particularly important because you want to be careful about the funding that you accept like there is more money out there. There is money that is more accessible but it comes with strings right to be and I think for Bitcoin education we have to be uncompromising in that it is independent and impartial and we're not speaking to improve the bottom line of company A or or company B or government A or whatever it is. Uh so that keeping that in mind it it's also another limiting factor on that. So so funding is is super important. >> Yeah. Uh and for us scaling becomes really difficult when it comes time to like level up developers. So we know that one-on-one mentorship works. Like that is a tried andrude model, but um the type of volume that we have, we just we're a very small team and we don't have enough devs to go around to do that mentoring. Um I participate in organizing the chain code labs boss challenge and this year we had over 2,000 applicants but like there does come a point where like you can do all this studying you can do all these courses and like you just need someone to kind of tell you you need to like rebase this PR or like this person's feedback is really important and that one-on-one attention is extremely difficult to scale. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I would almost say like, you know, in educa. It's kind of an ironic thing because we're trying to teach people things, but then the bottleneck to teaching more people becomes the small group of people that have the initial understanding, right? So it's like okay we have this group of people that know a lot about this particular subject matter or section or Bitcoin or whatever technical aspect and it's like okay how do we really the the barrier to the next level up is well we need like twice as many people who have that depth of understanding who then can reach you know the next hundred people or whatever but getting just that just doubling the number of people that have deep understanding takes time um maybe arch I don't want to take too much but like Um the I'm really curious right now we like kind of live in like the beginning of the AI LLM era. I'm really curious to see how that impacts education like and learning going forward. >> We're going to we're going to come back to AI for sure. It's it's it's an obligatory question. Just a follow up on what you were saying Stacy, right? Like given the work that you're doing with BDK and I I think technical education is different than general education and it has different audiences, right? How are you keeping your education fun and interactive while keeping it technically, you know, accurate, right? Like how how are you dealing with that? >> Yeah, that's a that's a challenge and it's a really fun challenge. Um, I'm personally very interested in producing educational content that uses many different mediums. So, as part of the Bitcoin dev project, we have like traditional courses like we have one that can teach you Rust. Um, we have, you know, guides and material that you can read. We also have like uh interactive cohorts that people across the world have actually run for their own groups. Uh we have a game called Saving Satoshi. It's a little bit of an interactive coding adventure and all this is fun and great. Oh, I also like to write these little zenes. Um but yeah, to your point, getting it concise is really hard um because you want to be able to communicate things to people correctly, but you also don't want to overwhelm them. And I think that the tension there is uh a challenge, but it's it's fun. >> Yeah. And that's a really good point to stay on, right? Because it's it's different communities, like I mentioned, it's people in different regions, right, John? Me, Premier, Bitcoin has scaled into dozens of different countries and dozens of different languages. How have you been able to approach different places, right? like cuz you know especially with our work at HRF and we're we're thinking about education in how how it's different authoritarian regimes versus in the west right like how have you been looking at that angle >> yeah great question and I was I was actually thinking of this myself so thanks for prompting this um another challenge for for us specifically as we move from one location to try and support education everywhere around the world is how do we scale to be global and still treat these these cohorts or these individuals as these smaller groups with totally different contexts. Um, and we're still figuring that out, but but our answer thus far to that quandry is and and this came out like literally just a few days ago. We we had three existing programs and we released three three additional programs. Um, the Bitcoin Diploma, if you've heard of that, is kind of our flagship, but we have we have five additional ones now. And all of them we we did a lot of work on the back end with the file format and the infrastructures. So, now they are all designed to be able to put into an AI program to modify it. So, so there's this base. Let's take the Bitcoin diploma. There's this base there and you could just use that. Maybe, maybe that serves you really well. But if you want to change the language, you want to change the context uh based on you know profession or gender or age or or interest or whatever, you could put that into the AI and it could modify that program. So it and that works for an individual student that's going to self-pace. they're going to teach on they're going to learn on their own. Or if you're a teacher and the idea is like, hey, I'm a I'm a teacher in Kenya and I'm teaching a group of of of 10 people. They're all electricians under 40. And you put it into the AI and it will change. In this case, not, but it could change the language, but it could change the graphics. It might change the examples. like rather than referencing dollars, it would reference chillin or or it would change that context to make it to make it appeal to a much smaller audience. We build frameworks for the world, but we try to make it adaptable for much smaller audiences. >> Yeah. And um we we talked about we mentioned students earlier, right Nifty? I mean, you have been a part of the recent launch of the Bitcoin Scholars Fund and you've we've also been working together on the Bitcoin students network and similar initiatives for the past few years. Um, how how are you feeling right now about educating students? >> Uh, you know, honestly, I think that there's a lot to be done still like and there's students, you know, when you say students, I think that's there's a lot of different groups there. There's like a college age students, there's primary school students, there's secondary school students. So, the Bitcoin Scholars Fund project that we just launched. This is a new 501c3. We just got word that we're officially um a 501c3 today, which is very exciting, which means we are um officially can start accepting donations. um that is a project um that's kind of aimed at creating a big carrot to get um primary and secondary schools and people who are already in the education system incentivized to come and learn about how Bitcoin works um through a scholarship fund. So making it such that their schools can get scholarships for their students if their educators at those schools kind of prove some sort of mastery or understanding of Bitcoin. Um I think that's kind of a fun way to start angling towards um the educator level of the students, right? Because reaching students I think is difficult. Um and one thing I think we're talking about like you know education I kind of think of education as a perpetually like grassroots problem. Sure a lot of people learn things online. So a lot of information and new concepts are consumed through Tik Tok or reals on Instagram. So you can reach a lot of people through education through like online media, but traditional education, I don't think that's going away. I think it's going to be like grassroots. And what you know what does grassroot means? That means kind of like personto person. Like you kind of have to know someone like Stacy was talking about having mentors. John's talking about wanting to make sure that the the educational um information and curriculum that they're putting out meets with like the specific groups that are using it. um you know students are another kind of grassroots organization and the like so how do you reach them well you kind of have to reach them through like you know the college level I think it's a lot of work like Bitcoin students network going through clubs that the students themselves are organizing that becomes okay how do you get in touch with them how do you incentivize students to pay attention to this like how do you get their attention how do you make this something that they're interested in paying attention to like what's the hook um and then at like the primary and secondary school like kind of through the Bitcoin scholars fund like the approach we're taking there is okay the educators already have the audience of the students for better or worse um you know maybe the home school is like a separate thing but a lot of students at like those levels are sort of locked into an existing infrastructure and institution so how do you get those institutions interested and knowledgeable about Bitcoin such that they can kind of do some of the grassroots education themselves >> no exactly yeah um as promised we're going to come back to AI AI, right? So, in in a world where and and we're seeing this at the Human Rights Foundation, right? Like we're seeing how AI can just completely transform organizations and help them scale, right? But increasingly so, we're also in a world of AI slop, right? And when you're as educators, as you're trying to make content, right, you you want it to really tell a story, right? Like you want it to be accurate because you're building tools that have not been in the past, right? So what's been your experience maybe on the good side and the bad side of of of what you've seen? We'll start with Stacy. >> Okay. So AI is a wonderful tool that can be used both correctly and incorrectly and we've seen you know both ends of the spectrum there. I will say first and foremost um the Bitcoin Dev Project does put out some educational content and sometimes we use AI to create like visuals and like explainers and videos. Um, I think that the human editing part is is very important there. Uh, but also as part of, you know, the boss challenge, we tried to use these code challenges as ways to um, sort through signal over noise. And this past year, because the LLMs have gotten so good, it's been really difficult now to see the signal over the noise. So, people have to get more creative. Um, and I think that, you know, at at a certain point, you can use AI for whatever you want, so nothing matters. But by that same reasoning, everything matters. Like you can do whatever you want now. And so it becomes more meaningful if you choose to write a piece of software, you know, not necessarily by hand, which is kind of a crazy thought given that we were all doing that two years ago. Um, but to, you know, not just like throw it into claude and and take whatever comes out. So um, I'm very curious to hear from the other panelists. >> No. Yeah. John, like quality, right? like I've I've I've read through your your the the diplomas, right? It's like it's very intentional, right? I mean, if if people can just plug this into AI, right? Like is it is it is it good? Like how how are you looking at that? >> Yeah, I mean it's it's a it's a mixed bag, right? It's nuanced. Um and as I mentioned with the example before that AI is integral to our strategy to think local but act sorry think global but act local right we want to we want to serve educators all over the world but AI is what enables us or what enables them to make it more relevant for their local context without AI then I I don't know how we would approach that. So that's super helpful. But then I think a challenge with AI is well one there's multiple challenges, right? Like there's the challenge of like poor quality. I I imagine that go and we're we're we're super particular. We put in a lot of work to make sure the materials and and all the stuff that we create is of the best quality. and we're going to have to compete with someone who comes out with, you know, they put five minutes of work in to to make 50 different books, right? And they could flood the market with that. They could spam the market with that and and the quality won't be as good, but they're not it it's effectively spam, right? And I think we're we're going to see that. And that that is one challenge, one major challenge. Um, another one is I I think there's a danger of leaning too heavily into AI and leaning too heavily into the digital and our our solution to that is to pair it with a social layer that exists in the real world. Um so we are also all of you know I mentioned that we work with with projects in in more than 40 countries around the world and one of the things that that we do is we try to build community both digitally right we have like if you're part of the community there's a monthly meeting where we get together and we share best practices and maybe you could find people and have a mentor mentee relationship with different projects but also uh and now the rhythm at least this year we're we're doing it four times so say roughly quarterly have an educators unconference. We had one last month in sorry earlier this month in Kenya. The next one will be in June in Prague and then later in the year in Indonesia and then Colombia where we try to bring people that we work with but it's also open to the public, anybody interested in Bitcoin education to come together, share best practices and actually meet the people right and and then form a connection and and build this community because otherwise it could seem like we are in silos, right? And we need to be connected and not just in the digital realm, in the physical realm. And I think there's a danger that we lean too heavily into AI. Um whether it's AI slop and it's just volume over quality or if it's AI is just going to do everything and we don't actually have to interact in the real world with each other. >> Nifty, I know you have opinions >> about AI stuff, you know. Yeah. Um, I get I I get really excited about a future where the people's ability to access information has only gotten better in some ways, right? Um, my, you know, I run a conference business which is all about getting people together to talk about technical concepts. And for me, like one of the challenges is like, okay, well, how many people, a lot of people like won't come to my conferences because they don't feel like they understand enough to be able to show up, you know? So, John's talking about the importance of getting people together. If people won't show up for your thing because they think it's outside of their depth, it's too complicated, they're not going to understand things, that really limits, you know, not to be like, you know, it's kind of a product I'm trying to sell, like my market is small. Um, and for Bitcoin, like in development sense, it's it would be really great if more people felt like it was an accessible thing. So, I get really excited about AIS and LLM in terms of the potential to increase the number of people that feel like this is something that they can participate in. Like the barrier to entry for something that's technical or maybe in the past it would be hard to find good information on, I like to believe has gone down. We'll see if I'm right about that. So, I get really excited about that. Um, I get less excited about the fact that and maybe it's misinformation. So, a lot of the times I'll talk to an LLM about stuff or I'll ask it questions about something that I'm an expert in and the answers are usually quite divergent from what I would say is actually the truth. Um, I don't know how to combat that. I'm not really sure what the answer is. Um, I do think it is convincing people to come and talk to other experts who do know things. Um, but I I I I guess my only worry with it is that people take what the LLM has to say as being an expert rather than the people who actually know what the truth is. And so you end up with people who have these um misunderstandings that are difficult to correct because they got it from a trusted expert source, which is the LLM. Um, and don't understand necessarily that LLMs are not to be trusted all the time. I mean, they're when they're good, they're great, but when they're wrong, it's they're very wrong. And I think if you're just consuming it as someone who doesn't know a lot about it, which is probably the majority of the people that are asking questions, that's why you're asking it questions. You just don't know what you don't know. And the LLM isn't, you know, maybe really helpful, but it could be a little harmful. So, I don't know. >> Tread tread carefully. Yeah. >> Um, before we move to the interactive portion, right, just just really quick, I want to know what's next for for your work. Um, and also, you know, if there are any people who are newer to the education space that want to plug into what you're doing, how can they get involved? We'll we'll go back in the same order this way. >> Cool. Um, so depending on what you're up to, if you're looking to, um, I would say one of the best ways to get communities, if you're a grassroots organizer, you're an educator yourself, you're looking to level up your own understanding of how Bitcoin works technically, wherever you are maybe in your journey in Bitcoin, I would highly recommend you check out the project that we're doing at B 58 called the Bitcoin at workshop. We're doing a happy hour tomorrow night. I think 5:00 to 7:00 at I think it's called Beer House. Um just come by and hang out and check it out. It's a two-hour workshop that we've put together that really you do like a group or a classroom and it teaches yourself and the other people that are playing a lot about how Bitcoin works like technically. Um and you can check out more about that project at b58.school. Um yeah, a good a good reference for for My First Bitcoin is just on the website uh that that's how you could find existing materials. You could find out how to plug in to join the network that I mentioned already. So that's just my first bitcoin.org. Um and then like a brief preview of where we're heading. So the release that I mentioned already from from this week where we redevelop things to make it more compatible with AI. um that is the direction that we're heading in and this was the first there was a lot of work on the back end to make that for this release and I'm sure there's going to be kinks so we're we're going to learn a lot in the next few months and our new release schedule is a major release every two years and three point releases in between so every six months of point release. So the next one will be in October and there's going to be I'm sure we're going to do a much better job from from this one to October. And in addition to that, we're also probably late this year or maybe even early next year, uh we're building a lot of other stuff. Um we're building an application. One of the things on the application which I'm excited about it will be I mean the idea is to make it like a dualingo for Bitcoin education, but also to create a peer-to-peer marketplace to make it easy for anyone that wants to learn about Bitcoin to link them with with educators, right? because maybe in your local area you don't know where to start or if you're doing it online maybe the time zone doesn't work for you and and you're a night owl whatever it is. Um so we want to create a peer-to-p peer marketplace to connect the two. So that that's what we're building toward >> and as far as the Bitcoin dev project goes we are continuing our search for talented individuals that want to participate in Bitcoin open-source software. We believe that it's a very viable and fulfilling career path. Uh tomorrow I will be giving a talk at 2 p.m. in the open source workshop area on this. Uh you can find us at bitcoindevs.xyz and we'll just continue to push out content and uh reach out to the developers that are interested in working in Bitcoin full-time. >> Yeah. And on our side at HRF, um we have a Bitcoin development fund where we grant educators all around the world who are who are doing work um to produce conferences, to do translations, education. So you can learn more about that at hrf.orgdevf fund. We're also running education for activists and um nonprofit groups. Um if you want to learn more, you can just go to hf.org. And then on the Bitcoin Students Network side of things, if you're curious about running your own club at school and you want to plug into the resources we have, you can go to bitcoinstudsnetwork.org. Um, but now moving into the interactive portion, I don't know if we have a mic roaming around, but um, I think feel free if anyone has any questions, just come up here and I'll pass you my mic. >> Welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct. Your prediction, your edge. Dual bits. Predict where everything is a market. Uh good day guys. Um my name is Doug. I'm from Australia. I uh I teach financial literacy back home in Australia as well. Um I'm a massive fan of Bitcoin. I pretty much that's where my bread and butter is. But I've always noticed that in teaching the students that I've taught, if I focus solely upon that element, some of them would uh be skeptical, bring up questions that have the normal doubts because of everything that they've seen in media, which I think is a reasonable um critique along the way. My question is in particular, when it comes down to the teaching of Bitcoin in particular, do you think that the approach toward it is better suited to teaching Bitcoin specifically or teaching sound money principles? Austrian economics going through that avenue first. I found that if I teach it that way, then they naturally come to that conclusion. But I'd like to know what your thoughts are on that. >> Um, yeah. So, we My first Bitcoin is focused on introductory education. So, we are focused on on I think the demographic that you're talking about, people that really don't know anything about Bitcoin and bringing them into the space. And our approach to that is similar to to what you're saying. So almost everything that almost all of our materials are in two parts. Uh roughly the first half is financial literacy. So what is money? Why is money? Like what is how did we arrive at this moment? And then because most people don't don't know that, right? And that's kind of like the foundation. And then the second half, okay, what is Bitcoin? And then we move on to Bitcoin. and we found that to be effective. But yeah, >> thank you. Um, my question is really tactical. So, Pennsylvania just passed a law that there needs to be personal finance in in high schools, right? So, my wife is going to be teaching that. Um, she brought the textbook home. Cryptocurrency is not in there anywhere. Bitcoin cryptocurrency at all. Keeping in mind that the investing section, there's a savings section and what he was just saying that it really builds on the economics of of uh balancing a checkbook, all that sort of stuff. You get about two weeks for the entire investing section and it's not in a textbook. What do you guys have material-wise to bring in cryptocurrency in an unbiased fashion and make it look like it wasn't an add-on, right? so that it actually looks like it's part of the curriculum and it's, you know, it's it's viable. It's not speculative. It's not all the things that it was, you know, four years ago. >> That's a great question. A lot of the stuff that I work on is on the more STEM side, I think, than like the personal finance stuff, but I really love the workshop that we do that teaches people about how Bitcoin works. Um, again, it may be a little more ste, but it's it's only two hours and you can go from being I don't really understand what an independent global ledger is. I don't know what that means. To having touched a Bitcoin transaction, seen them move around in person. Um, it's all hands-on. There's no computers. It's just like getting people together with pen and paper. I'm going to be doing a short demo of one section of what that workshop looks like tomorrow at the Freedom Go Up stage, I think at 2:00 or sometime in the afternoon. Um, it's like a hands-on transaction thing. Um, I'd love for you guys to come and participate and kind of just get an idea about what we're talking about with the transactions workshop that we're doing. Um and then again we're doing a happier tomorrow to you if you want to come see like a whole box and stuff but um unfortunately it isn't really um I feel like you know a lot of people talk about savings and learning about money. It's not that it's more just like from first principles like what is this Bitcoin thing? What does it mean to transact on like a distributed ledger? And so it's more like nuts and bolts like what is it what does transacting with money digitally even mean these days? Um, and staying true to that. >> Yeah. And if I could just add to that, uh, so Saving Satoshi, saving Satoshi.com is an educational, it's it's a mostly coding game, but the first three chapters cover some real basics. Like in the first chapter, you learn how to find and decode the hidden message in the Genesis block. And then the next two chapters are just simulations that you walk through that teach you how pulled mining works. And I have taught this um this this will be my second summer working with Nick Ba. I believe it's USC Marshall Davis School of Business. Uh, and his economics class. Um, they have one session every summer where they do that. So, it's it's gone well and it teaches Bitcoin in the unbiased way where it's just like, hey, this is some technology, you know, take it or leave it. >> John, tell them how to get your stuff. >> Excuse me. >> Tell him how to get the me premier Bitcoin. >> Yeah. Um, so, so what could be relevant to to your question there? So we have again a variety of different programs, but we we also have an intro program which is designed to last one hour and it's the same format. So it's like roughly 30 minutes financial literacy, roughly 30 minutes Bitcoin education and that potentially could be something that you just plug in, right? Because it's so short. It's only an hour. >> Yeah. So, so you could find all that myirstbitcoin.org. >> So, my question is about the kind of the evolution or the future of My First Bitcoin. Um, is that my understanding is that it's a it's a it's a course, right? It's a series of lectures that a teacher can give. Do you see a future where that is like an online course where you don't need to have the the human leading the the room? You can just, you know, get a certificate somehow. >> Yes. Yes. And in fact, um, one of the new programs that we have is a self-paced Bitcoin diploma. Uh, because the Bitcoin diploma is is kind of our flagship, we we often do things we we add features to that first and and then maybe we might add like self-paced versions for the other courses if if that proves popular. But that already exists, the self-paced version where you could do it on totally on your own. Um, and in addition to that, some of the educators that we work with, I mean, it's up to them. Some some are in person, some are already teaching online. And that's part of the motivation for us developing this this peer-to-peer marketplace for it. Because if you do want to do it online, but with a teacher, not self-paced, like you're in a classroom, but it's it's just a digital classroom, then, you know, oftentimes it might be a time zone thing. like it doesn't have to be a teacher in the same city. It could be a teacher halfway around the world. Um I think longer longer term what I think will happen is it will break up and it won't just be as as the ecosystem grows it won't just be about finding the right time. Uh educators will be able to again create more specific types of of programs. So it's like, you know what, I'm uh I am I don't know what you're I'm a social worker, right? So like I is is there is there Bitcoin education that is geared towards social workers, right? And that and you could look in the marketplace for that and probably if you want to get really specific like that, it's probably not in the city. It's probably not something you could walk to. It might it might exist, but it might be in a far away place. And that's where that's where online becomes really useful to bring people together who maybe are quite far apart from each other physically. >> Awesome. Cool. We're we're right at time. Thank you guys for joining us. Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville. July 2027.