This is an opinion piece by Santiago Varela, a bitcoin miner and writer from Mexico City.
My sister turned 18 in early 2023 and I gave her a very unusual gift this holiday season. Because I love her, I sincerely believe that the best gift I can give her is the orange pill.
It all started with a letter I wrote for her explaining the gift I was about to give her. Then I gave him a copy of “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous and a hardware wallet. However, this was only the beginning of a long process that we had to go through together if I really wanted to give him an orange pill.
Of course, I was well aware that her first reaction to my surprise wasn’t going to include the typical face of an 18-year-old girl opening her presents on a merry Christmas morning. At first, she seemed more confused than excited. I’m sure she was expecting a nice pair of shoes or a cool gadget. I’m sorry sister, but this is how we maximalists roll.
In the birthday/holiday letter, I highlighted three reasons why I was giving her this specific gift:
- I want to put her on the path to financial freedom
- I want her to be a sovereign woman in a fiat world where dishonest relationships have been normalized
- As a high school girl who doesn’t know what she wants to study in college, she could benefit from bitcoin which could give her ideas on what she wants to do.
My sister’s long orange pilling process began with a quote from the prologue of “The Bitcoin Standard”, which I consider to be the ideal starting point. I asked him to read this quote over and over again before starting the orange-pilling 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 provide readers with an informed understanding of bitcoin before deciding whether to use it. It is only with such an understanding, and only after thorough and thorough research into the practical operational aspects of owning and storing bitcoins, that anyone should consider holding value in bitcoin. bitcoin’s rising market value may make it seem like a no-brainer as an investment, a closer look at the myriad of hacks, attacks, scams, and security breaches that have cost people their bitcoins provides a sobering warning to anyone who thinks owning bitcoin is a guaranteed profit.If you come away from reading this book thinking that bitcoin currency is worth owning Definitely, your first investment shouldn’t be in buying bitcoins, but in time spent understanding how to buy, store, and own bitcoins securely. It is the inherent nature of bitcoin that such knowledge cannot be delegated or outsourced. There is no alternative to the personal liability of anyone interested in using this network, and this is the real investment that must be made to get into bitcoin.
In the letter, I told him that I would help him set up the hardware wallet and send him some bitcoin. To start, I sent him $10 worth of bitcoins. But then, to make sure she invests the time in learning the necessary basic knowledge and to get her to understand the philosophy of proof of work, I promised that I would send her $100 worth of bitcoin for each chapter of the book she read. Therefore, I prepared a quiz for each chapter to check that she really read carefully.
However, as someone deep in the Bitcoin rabbit hole, I knew having him read the book to pile sats on his hardware wallet wasn’t enough. It was nothing, we were just getting started. So what was the next step in the orange-pilling journey? Every time I crossed an opportunity, I tried to convert that moment into a little bitcoin lesson.
For example, there was such an opportunity after my sister was given a project in her philosophy class in high school. Knowing that I’m a big fan of philosophy, she came to ask me for help. The project was to have a conversation with a member of your family but using the famous Socratic method for conversation. If you don’t know what it 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 bring out underlying ideas and assumptions”.
Obviously, we had a dialogue about bitcoin and money using the Socratic method.
Another thing I did on this orange journey was show him a rabbit hole inside the bitcoin rabbit hole: bitcoin mining and energy. I love bitcoin mining and the energy aspects of bitcoin. In fact, I like it so much that we have a ASIC in our garage. It wasn’t really hard to get him to understand how passionate I am about home mining. Believe it or not, she had never even seen my ASIC (she only heard the “brrrrrr”). Therefore, I took her to the garage and she gained practical experience. I also have my Bitcoin and Lightning nodes in the garage. It was great fun because with tools like Mempool.Space and LnVisualizer I was able to help him see the tangible side of Bitcoin. It was then that I really felt that everything was starting to fall into place.
As you all probably know, knowledge about Bitcoin cannot be delegated or outsourced. When it comes to Bitcoin, there is no alternative to personal liability. Although I told her I’d love to help her with anything, I can’t guide her down the rabbit hole forever. You have to go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole on your own. I guided her for a long time but the moment for her to embark on the journey for herself has arrived. As Oscar Wilde once said“Education is an admirable thing. But it’s good to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
So, I started treating her like any other Bitcoin plebs and let her go down the rabbit hole on her own. The only thing I did was send him a bunch of Resources (articles, podcasts, videos, books, etc.) and let it go its own way. At the same time, I realized that I could do it with other children who are around the same age as my sister. Even better, I realized that my sister could help me and introduce Bitcoin to her digital native friends because, if you care about Bitcoin, you should onboard people individually.
As a result, I decided to turn 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 give my heartfelt thanks to fellow Bitcoiners around the world who have shared content educational for anyone to use. For example, Mi Primer Bitcoin (from El Salvador) has an incredible Bitcoin diploma notebook that anyone can download for free. I have no doubt that initiatives like theirs or like Escuelita Bitcoin in Uruguay are what we need if we want a future with sovereign individuals. We need to teach young people.
Hopefully this will inspire other Bitcoiners around the world to introduce Bitcoin to their younger siblings. I’ve been inspired by initiatives like the ones mentioned above and stories like Denver college kids who became bitcoin entrepreneurs. Hopefully, the next time I write an article for Bitcoin Magazine, it will be about college kids in Mexico City who became Bitcoin entrepreneurs. For now, stay humble and stack the sats my friends.
This is a guest post by Santiago Varela. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
