SUCCESS! The First Grade School Bitcoin Project!

[Tuxavant]

Similarly - I cringe when people promote Bitcoin as 'no fees'.  We need to be upfront about it. Especially to kids. They remember little dishonesties like that - and might hate bitcoin like I hate the banks for it!

If you can't even pay the fee with a unit of currency we're all use to, then I can't with a straight face say there are any fees. The typical transaction fees are currently less than a penny and un payable with our current financial system - so there really is no context. Yes, there is a fee, but the breath you exhale speaking of it is almost worth more than the fee itself. Now, having said that, I eventually get around to explaining the fee part when they are at the level of intelligently discussing the lower level blockchain discussions.

[elggawf]

When I was a kid, a large bank got class time to come and indoctrinate us into the way of banking.
It was a bit of a scam - because the special 'kids' bank accounts they gave us were insulated from reality by not having fees.
It came as a bit of a shock as a teenager to find my few dollars whittled away. I wish they'd just been honest from the outset.

Find a bank with no account maintenance fees - problem solved (well one, anyway).

If you can't even pay the fee with a unit of currency we're all use to, then I can't with a straight face say there are any fees. The typical transaction fees are currently less than a penny and un payable with our current financial system - so there really is no context. Yes, there is a fee, but the breath you exhale speaking of it is almost worth more than the fee itself. Now, having said that, I eventually get around to explaining the fee part when they are at the level of intelligently discussing the lower level blockchain discussions.

Well you can say "really really low fees", "less than a penny fees", "statistically insignificant fees", but absolutely none of those are the same as "no fees", which is what a lot of Bitcoiners are parroting around, and it is wrong.

[waspoza]

Amazing job!

[realnowhereman]

Well you can say "really really low fees", "less than a penny fees", "statistically insignificant fees", but absolutely none of those are the same as "no fees", which is what a lot of Bitcoiners are parroting around, and it is wrong.

For any non-trivial amount; miners will include the transaction with no fee.

Some miners will accept any transaction at all (although I forget which pool it is).  So it's not wrong at all (it just might take a looooong time to get that small transaction into a block).

It might be wrong one day; but it's not now -- so what's the problem?

[molecular]

Well you can say "really really low fees", "less than a penny fees", "statistically insignificant fees", but absolutely none of those are the same as "no fees", which is what a lot of Bitcoiners are parroting around, and it is wrong.

For any non-trivial amount; miners will include the transaction with no fee.

Some miners will accept any transaction at all (although I forget which pool it is).  So it's not wrong at all (it just might take a looooong time to get that small transaction into a block).

It might be wrong one day; but it's not now -- so what's the problem?

Well, you can't advertise "no fees" and "faster than traditional banking" at the same time. You might not have been around, but there have been times at which no-fee transactions where piling up for multiple days (in the hundreds) and no miner was including them because the space reserved by the vanilla satoshi client (back then everyone just used that) was not big enough for the non-fee transactions being inserted by an attacker (if I recall correctly).

It's not much of a payment system if you can't expect your transactions to go through at some point. Without a fee, you can't, so I agree with previous poster that saying bitcoin transactions "are free" is false.

In my mind the much more compelling reasons for using bitcoin is its properties as a money, not as a payment system anyway

Hey OP, did you talk about the kids about fractional reserve banking or touch that at all?

[Tuxavant]

Hey OP, did you talk about the kids about fractional reserve banking or touch that at all?

The closest I got was "usually governments and law makers have been tasked with creating money and defining its value and how it is used, but bitcoin has a predefined set of rules that can only be changed by all its users in every country around the world..." Anything more than that, and I feel I would have got the deer-in-the-headlights stare. I think that's probably a topic for grades 9-12.

Now that I have a basic syllabus, I plan on going over it in more detail with a teacher from each grade and developing a grade specific version.

[wachtwoord]

Explaining fractional reserve banking to anyone is hard because the underlying concept is retarded. It's amazing that it isn't considered fraud.

Anyway really cool project and people saying they have nothing to buy with it miss the concept of the project completely. If you let children trade with each other they will form their own economy!

When I was in elementary school I did something similar. We wrote with fountain pens and re-filled them with containers which contained small glass/plastic spheres (bullet) to keep them closed before they were opened. There was a limited (but for all intended purposes indefinite) supply of these little spheres in the class (every time you ran out of ink) and I convinced people to use this to buy things of off each other. I bought things like pens, erasers, pencil sharpeners and let people do my arts and crafts (I also exchanged that for computer tasks on the Windows 3.11 machine lol). I recall some guys tried to trade it for kisses from girls too, I don't really recall if that worked though (prostitution FTW!). This lasted for the last 3 years of elementary school or something. Doing something similar with Bitcoins is far far better (indefinite supply, we actually had inflation and rising prices with the spheres haha).

[Tuxavant]

I recall some guys tried to trade it for kisses from girls too, I don't really recall if that worked though (prostitution FTW!).

Given your current project.. this explains your smashing success! hahaha

[molecular]

Explaining fractional reserve banking to anyone is hard because the underlying concept is retarded. It's amazing that it isn't considered fraud.

That's so true. I had troubles understanding the "concept" myself, because it's so stupid, it really can't be, "I must be misunderstanding".

I think the second a child would understand it, they would immediately go: "but that's such an unfair rip-off!"

[wachtwoord]

I recall some guys tried to trade it for kisses from girls too, I don't really recall if that worked though (prostitution FTW!).

Given your current project.. this explains your smashing success! hahaha

Oh I wasn't interested back then. Wasting my precious spheres on stupid girls? Outrageous! 

[d.james]

You should really give each kids like 1 BTC, who can successfully download and use the bitcoin client.
1. Free starter drug..BTC
2. First Graders
3.
4. profit?

[Tuxavant]

The problem is who's going to fund $150 to a classroom of 25 kids?

It really needs to be about $20 per kid because its impossible to buy anything remotely useful or novel with anything less, given shipping, etc.

I think what will make this ridiculously successful is when Charlie gets those Bitcoin Gift cards in the Walmart checkout stands. Then anyone you show this too will immediately realize that it is useful AND readily available.

[realnowhereman]

The problem is who's going to fund $150 to a classroom of 25 kids?

It really needs to be about $20 per kid because its impossible to buy anything remotely useful or novel with anything less, given shipping, etc.

I think what will make this ridiculously successful is when Charlie gets those Bitcoin Gift cards in the Walmart checkout stands. Then anyone you show this too will immediately realize that it is useful AND readily available.

Actually I think it would be better to give them very little and encourage them to trade between themselves for a week. If you give them real world useful amounts they'll spend it and be done.

[CCU]

So after tipping my kid's teachers with Bitcoin during Teacher Appreciation Week, I have been invited to come to school this Friday and indoctrinate the little skulls full of mush to the wonders of Bitcoin.

Here is the flier I'm handing out during the class.

https://i.imgur.com/3jlX0.png

Prior to the class, I'll be writing in some Coin4.me short URLs to some instawallets with a few bitcents for the kids to play with.

During the class, I'll give them the general idea of Bitcoin, show them how to move bitcoins around from wallet to wallet, and invite them to trade them for crafts (or whatever they can think of) and then I'll give the teacher some ideas for some kind of report in a week or two to discuss what they learned and how they used it.

I'm reaching out to many leaders of education related projects, I think we should work together:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=632905.msg7047919#msg7047919