I arranged to sit down with this young fella and his parents and siblings and had him read Bitville to his younger sisters (https://a.co/d/bg0KgJy). I gave a copy of Saif’s Bitcoin Standard to his folks. I set him up with an old mk3 Coldcard from nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8 and helped him back it up, both analog and digitally.

This young fella then. Buys $100 in bitcoin from me. I send him the sats and make a balance sheet for him with assets on the left and liabilities on the right.

After telling him tales of my monumental stupidity while watching bitcoin price rise from 10¢ to $0.1M, I tell him to borrow the $100 he just gave me and go buy another 100,000-ish sats. We add this to his balance sheet. He now has $200 worth of assets and $100 in liabilities. I tell him he must repay the loan when he is 18, but he can chose whether to pay back dollars or sats.

To test him and really drive the point home, I brought a 1/10th oz gold coin and told him to borrow $300 from me and buy the coin from me. I tell him he has to pay one loan back by age 18 and the other by age 30. He can chose dollars, gold, or sats. But it is his job to manage his time, skills, and balance sheet to stay solvent so he can repay his loans. I mean, the kid is 12 and he’s up to his eyeballs in debt :)

I sincerely hope he eventually realizes it will be to his advantage to sell the gold and learn how to acquire more sats on his own. I set the “label” on his coldcard to be my email address so that someday he can plug it in and contact me to repay his debt.

If I had learned the lesson I am try to teach him when I was younger, I would literally be a billionaire today.

I can’t say this is entirely altruistic. If he can’t figure out how to sell the gold and buy bitcoin by the time he’s 18, he fails the test. And as he fancies my daughter this is a bar he will have to cross to even have a chance to be in the running…at least from my perspective :)