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Just got back from Buenos Aires for https://btcpp.dev/conf/ba24 . Just as high quality of an event as the one in Mexico, @niftynei did a great job organizing. Presentations were solid, mostly about engineering using Lightning for real world scenarios. It was great to get a concrete sense of what the south American community of Bitcoin engineers are like, I was impressed, a lot of very competent people. Bitcoin conferences used to mainly consist of dreamers .. but nowadays I see people that are both normal, and also seem like they could get shit done.

I also finally got to experience the famous "bitcoin LARP" in person (I have some things to say about that, will probably write a separate note).

waxwing 1y ago

As promised:

The Bitcoin LARP exercise at btc++ Buenos Aires: as a former teacher of many years, this was very interesting to me. I almost felt like I was back in my first year or two of teaching (or learning to teach), because this had the key elements that were considered so crucial in teaching to mixed ability groups. Learning in small groups, learning by discovery, open endedness of tasks, and the, let's say "emotional timbre" (fun vs dry/boring). Another aspect is having goals/targets .. a little bit of lighthearted competition. (1/2)

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Discussion

waxwing 1y ago

If you don't know what the bitcoin LARP is, it simulates mining and transactions with pieces of card, each group also having a calculator that does a rudimentary hashcash search, to let them mine for blocks. Everything in the real P2P network of bitcoin is simulated, just with "easier" versions (like word identifiers instead of 32 byte hashes). The first thing to consider is: building activities like this is a *LOT* of work. That's why teachers at schools don't do this kind of thing 5 lessons every day. But they are popular.

Physical objects are a very good way to help people with abstract concepts; even if the objects are literally colored pieces of paper. (I remember doing this with post it notes to explain segwit in a talk in London. Oh, also Lightning. I like post-it notes apparently). The LARP uses this heavily (example: a small sticker of key is used to represent signing, with the (very clever!) idea to use a color coding to represent *which* key it is).

In observing less technical people in my group (we were in 6 separate groups, each with our own miner), I noticed that the first part, in which we constructed and checked transactions by considering validity of inputs and outputs, was *especially* helpful for them - it represents the kind of "skeleton" of bitcoin and it's something they could easily quickly pick up, especially in a group setting where confusions could be quickly clarified.

The activity slowly expands into a more chaotic structure. We start sharing transactions and validating others (also helps people clarify what "mempool" is really all about), and then mining by using the "calculators" and they're set up to take a few minutes (I guess, more or less), then we start passing around candidate blocks. I think a lot of the less technical are going to struggle a lot more at this point, because a lot of different things are happening at once. But as I said before, it's a lot of fun, so by a certain osmosis they are learning the basics. Meanwhile others find their competitive side takes over :)

It could make sense to spread this over multiple sessions. In chatting with a non-technical member of my group, that was also her thought: the second and third thirds (roughly) may have been more feasible to absorb if it was done in another session. I guess you can finesse it in quite a few ways.