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We had our November meetup at Pixels, Pints and Bytes in Norfolk, Virginia. The meetup turned out very well with parents, children and grandparents! All of us with the desire to have freedom of speech, freedom to save and spend our hard earned stacks of sats 1 the way we want to.

We were very fortunate to have the My First Bitcoin educational series created by the Bitcoin friendly plebs 2 in El Salvador. It’s an open source program focused on teaching people about Bitcoin, money and saving your wealth. The presentation slides were put together by a Father and 10 year old daughter team. We were able to use the large screen at Pixels so that was very helpful. It was an excellent presentation and both children and adults were able to learn and discuss the topics intelligently. For the next meetup we will recap this presentation and continue into further topics.

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Speaking of children and Bitcoin, we saw a great example where another father and daughter conversation occurred regarding acquisition of tokens for the arcade games in Pixels. The daughter wanted some Fiat 3 USD to purchase the tokens and Dad kindly said that he would exchange cash for some sats that she was saving. She and her sister took out their phones, opened the LNBITS lightning wallets that Dad set up for them and entered Dad’s Lightning Address. Next, they selected “USD” as the denomination they wanted to use and entered the amount of dollars they wanted.

The wallet converted the dollar amount to sats using the current BTCUSD exchange price. When they were satisfied with their entries, they pressed “Send”. Within seconds, the sats arrived in Dad’s wallet and he handed over the cash. Make no mistake about it Dad’s girls earn sats for extra chores that they do at home and they didn’t mind releasing some funds to dear old Dad. After all, how will he be able to pay them in the future? They know in confidence that investing in Dad is a good thing.

It was a great meetup. It was family friendly. The presentation on My First Bitcoin was informative. In addition to the presentation there were stickers to give away, a Bitaxe to see in action, a Bitcoin box game and informal discussions afterward on Ham Radio, Meshtastic, Nostr and many other subjects. As always we learned more than we came in with information wise. We hope you will join us again if you were there and if you are new to Bitcoin please come next time.

Topics Covered in our last November 2024 meetup:

  1. My First Bitcoin Open Source Bitcoin Education for the World. Get the My First Bitcoin slides PDF here.
    1. What is Money
    2. Functions of Money
    3. Time Preference - High Verses Low
    4. Characteristics of Money
    5. Barter Economics
    6. Transition from Sound to Unsound Money
    7. Types of Money - Paper or Plastic and digital currency
  2. Ham Radio Get Licensed
  3. Bitaxe The bitaxe is a fully open source bitcoin miner.
  4. Meshtastic An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices
  5. Bitcoin Wallets
  6. No Agenda Podcast No Agenda Show
  7. Bolt 12 BOLT 12 is a proposed upgrade to the Lightning network. For users, it can enable things like reusable payment requests, increased receiver privacy, and increased censorship resistance.
  8. Core Lightning CLN High-performance Lightning. Customizable to meet enterprise needs.
  9. Lighting Labs LND Lightning Labs building faster, cheaper, global layer-two bitcoin
  10. LNbits The world’s most powerful suite of bitcoin tools. Run for yourself, for others, or as part of a stack.

Next Meetup on December 14, 2024. Check back with us at the beginning of December for more details of time and place.

Footnotes

  1. Sats are a term you will hear a lot in Bitcoin circles. 1 Bitcoin contains 100,000,000 Sats. The term Sat is short for Satoshi. Satoshi Nakamoto is the mysterious founder of the Bitcoin White Paper and Bitcoin. Decimal wise 1 Satoshi is 8 digits behind the decimal point in Bitcoin like this 0.00000001 ↩

  2. Plebs, short for plebeians, are ordinary people. As no one is extraordinary in Bitcoin. We just try to be normal humans with the machinations of convoluted money. Plebians ↩

  3. Fiat is the short term used for “Fiat Currency” which is a money that has been declared by a king or government. It is also a currency that is not backed by anything other than the declaration that it is money. As of 1971 the US Dollar was formerly backed by gold but it is now a pure fiat currency. Nixon Shock ↩