What is Mi Primer Bitcoin’s mission?

We have a vision statement, which is “three simple steps to change the world.” The first step is to demonstrate bitcoin education as a tool for empowerment at a mass scale, which is what we're doing here in El Salvador. Step two is to make that example easy to replicate around the world, and that's the node network, our international affiliates. Step three is to create common ground and make this impossible to oppose, which is something that we're probably going to get into more next year with an advisory board and just try to really change the narrative that bitcoin education is a hill to die on, not just for us who are bitcoin educators, but for everyone.

How has Mi Primer Bitcoin evolved over the past few years?

It's hard to believe how much it's grown. And I'm an idealist. We started out very modestly. I designed a basic intro class and recruited some Salvadorians to first teach about bitcoin using this material. We had no money, we had no budget, we had no social media account, no visibility. First class, one person came. At this point, we impact thousands of students every month, tens of thousands if we count some of the secondary effects of working with administrative education and with the node network.

How has the Discovery Grant helped Mi Primer Bitcoin?

A little more than a year ago we applied to get a Discovery Grant from Block. And we were fortunate enough to receive that grant. We used Block's Discovery Grant to prepare to scale our operations and expand internationally by building our own Learning Management System. Having our own online school will allow us to not only teach online classes, but also turn our programs, like the Bitcoin Diploma, into courses that anyone around the world can enroll in and study at their own pace. Building our own LMS is foundational to our international efforts and will allow us to reach more students with open-source bitcoin education.

You mentioned your node network. How does it feel to see the Mi Primer Bitcoin curriculum spread around the globe?

It gives me so much hope. Mi Primer Bitcoin in a lot of ways is a grand experiment to push the limits of what's possible today in order to reimagine what's possible tomorrow. So the fact that we could do this and we get support from the community, we get support from Block and people that just see that this is a good thing and want to support it, period. To see it grow and to be able to work with projects like Bitcoin Ekasi or so many other wonderful projects around the world, and to see that it's not this isolated thing. It's not just like a group of people here in El Salvador, it's also in South Africa, it's also in Guatemala, it's also in Argentina, it's all across the world.

Where do you see Mi Primer Bitcoin five years from now?

So, we're only three years old at this point. Five years from now, we will have more open-source, empowerment-focused educational resources. Bitcoin is a tool. It's not the ends, it's the means. And the means is an individual that feels empowered in their own life. So we'll have a library of tools that will expand significantly. We’ll have significantly better infrastructure. The node network will be in every country in the world, and that makes it so much more powerful because it adds a lot of resiliency, and it also speeds up the timeline of sharing best practices.