Building a Bitcoin Nation
El Salvador is the front line of the next war
Bitcoin will win, I have no doubt of that. Our future world will be built on the shoulders of the revolution that Satoshi Nakomoto launched. The genie will never go back into the bottle. However, who benefits is very much to be determined.
We are a small group of people based in El Salvador with the mission to change the world.
There are two versions of Bitcoin’s success. In one, Bitcoin and the revolution it launched will push the world toward decentralization, self-sovereignty, and personal responsibility. It can help us create a world where individuals have more control over their own lives and centralized institutions have less. This is the world we want, this is the world we are fighting for. In this version, Bitcoin is a tool for empowerment and a representation of hope.
In the other version, Bitcoin is a tool of tyranny. It is co-opted by powerful centralized institutions which leverage the technology to increase their power and decrease ours. This path is a more extreme version of our current reality. Blockchain is used to take away the last of our privacy and independence. All our transactions are tracked and monitored — and I’m not just talking about how we spend our money; I’m talking about how we spend our life.
As the first nation to adopt Bitcoin, El Salvador is the front line of the next war. This is the first battle in what can be humanity’s first real revolution. It’s about power, always has been. In the past every revolution has fought to change who holds power; this is the first time we might be able to radically alter how we interact with power. Everything before was a superficial change by comparison.
El Salvador is small enough and we are early enough that we can make a real difference. We can change the outcome. We can put our thumb on the scale. We can change the world.
What happens here in the next months and years will echo across borders for a generation. We can win. But it won’t be easy. We must be more than passive observers.
I quit my job at the United Nations in New York and moved to El Salvador in August to help propel that first vision forward. I’ve lived in Latin America much of my adult life and have been obsessed with the far-reaching potential of Bitcoin for nearly a decade. This is my place, right here, right now. This is my purpose.
Education is the most important thing right now. The Bitcoin Law came fast, and the country is NOT prepared. Few people here know the basics and even fewer understand the nuances of the various ways to use Bitcoin, such as the differences between using Chivo, the government-controlled application, or a wallet where the user holds their own keys. New users will also be vulnerable to bad actors and scam artists. There’s also outside pressure and mis-information campaigns. To an uninformed citizen, when they see scare-mongering headlines that quote the IMF or foreign think-tanks funded by international banks, they don’t question that perspective. Education is our best defense and our best offense.
MyFirstBitcoin/ MiPrimerBitcoin is an international Bitcoin education non-profit which aims to teach Salvadorians about Bitcoin and funnel outside resources to the front-line.
We hire local teachers to give introductory courses to small groups. Teachers are paid in Bitcoin and students also receive $10 in the cryptocurrency during the class so that we can show, rather than just tell. We try to keep class sizes small and outside costs low by using donated spaces and time as much as possible. Each class costs us about $90. We pay for everything in Bitcoin and try to not just lead by example but also help create a circular economy.
We have big plans to expand classes to the Global North which will be paid and help fund operations in El Salvador as well as expand the free class structure to neighboring countries. We also plan to expand our online classes, add advanced courses, and to create workplace programs where we partner with large businesses and factories here to give free classes to their employees. As we expand our reach, we’ll likely lower to $5 the student bonus — teachers will still get around $30 per class. We’ve got big plans, much of which we still need to build but there is no time to waste. We launched the first classes in late September and are growing and learning rapidly. Our pace is such that we are doubling our total number of students taught about every ten days. We have some creative ideas to fundraise, but donations will always play a significant role. See other ways to help and connect with our social media.
This is our time. This is our chance to radically change the world.
