Company Name: My Bitcoin Primer
Founder: John Dennehy
Date of establishment: August 2021
Location of the head office: The savior
Amount of Bitcoin in Treasury: About 0.5 BTC
Number of employees: 21
Website: https://miprimerbitcoin.io/
Public or private? Private (non-profit)
John Dennehy wants change the world — and he believes Bitcoin education is one way to do that.
Dennehy sees Bitcoin as a tool that can help people take back control of their own lives. He understands that education is essential to help people use this tool.
So in late 2021, he created a Bitcoin education platform called My Primer Bitcoin (My First Bitcoin) as a way to empower ordinary Salvadorans.
He believes that Bitcoin users need to thoroughly understand the technology they are working with for the Bitcoin revolution to truly succeed.
“Education will obviously resist any attempt to co-opt the revolutionary spirit of Bitcoin,” Dennehy told Bitcoin Magazine.
Dennehy doesn’t hesitate to call wider adoption of Bitcoin a revolution, but keep in mind that his approach is more Gandhian than Guevara’s.
Dennehy is a gentle, introspective and kind person with a remarkably thoughtful approach.
The inspiration for Mi Primer Bitcoin
In early 2021, like many of us during the COVID lockdown, Dennehy was concerned about people’s powerlessness and wanted to do something about it.
“I was in New York during the pandemic and spent a lot of time taking long walks, thinking about the state of the world and the direction society was moving in,” Dennehy said.
“I came to the conclusion that the core of the problem was that collectively we had lost agency, we had lost sovereignty – the individual had lost agency in his own life – and that had a lot of second- and third-order negative effects,” he added.
“The solution was Bitcoin education. The solution was to get more people involved in Bitcoin and to do it in a way that empowers and encourages people to think for themselves, to think critically, and to take control of their own lives and futures.”
Dennehy was inspired by the wave of inspiration and booked a flight to Ecuador, a country he had previously lived in and a place that was “underserved by the current system,” as he put it, to begin his Bitcoin education mission.
A first attempt
Dennehy arrived in Ecuador in June 2021. There, he tried to educate friends about Bitcoin, but struggled to meet people in person due to the pandemic. Without in-person meetings, he found it difficult to connect with people.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” Dennehy said of his experience in Ecuador.
However, while in Ecuador, Dennehy was informed that El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announcement that bitcoin would become legal tender in El Salvador.
After nearly becoming disbeliever, Dennehy booked his next flight, a one-way ticket to El Salvador, to help the country make history.
“I decided to sell my assets, buy a one-way ticket to El Salvador to see how I could help make it successful,” Dennehy said. “As the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, for better or worse, El Salvador was going to be an example to the world, and I felt it was imperative that it was a good example.”
Humble beginnings
Dennehy landed in El Salvador and quickly set up Mi Primer Bitcoin’s mission statement and also some lesson plans. He also began recruiting both students and teachers.
“The tactic was to talk to every Salvadoran I met – the Uber driver, the waitress at the restaurant, the person waiting next to me to cross the street – about Bitcoin,” Dennehy said.
“Before the first class, there were a couple of gatherings of this really random group of people. They came to my Airbnb and talked about (Bitcoin) as a group,” he said.
“A few people from that group would volunteer for the project.”
Despite his years of experience as an ESL teacher and cycling instructor, Dennehy knew from the beginning that he was not the right person to teach the program he wanted to create. Instead, he wanted locals to play that role.
“From the beginning, one of the core concepts was that it had to be community-led, meaning that the teachers had to be able to engage with their students in a way that I never could,” Dennehy explained. “So, as a hard and fast rule, all the teachers here in El Salvador are Salvadoran.”
The first class was held in a yoga studio between classes and there was only one student present. But by the end of the first month, a total of five classes had been attended, held in the same yoga studio or in cafes or restaurants.
Development of Mi Primer Bitcoin’s “Bitcoin Diploma” Program
In February 2022, Dennehy and the growing team at Mi Primer Bitcoin began putting together a solid curriculum that would make it his “Bitcoin diploma” program.
“We went through the 2022 calendar year with three versions of (the program),” Dennehy said.
“We were just iterating really fast. We didn’t start building until February and the third version was done in September,” he added.
Dennehy also noted that student feedback on what worked and what didn’t play a big role in the process.
During my conversation with Dennehy, I got the impression that putting together a curriculum was not one of the biggest challenges the organization faced.
The Challenges of Running Mi Primer Bitcoin
An ongoing challenge that Mi Primer Bitcoin has faced since its early days is ensuring the independence and impartiality of the non-profit organization.
Dennehy discussed how many Salvadorans associate Bitcoin with the Salvadoran government, an institution that many people in the country have mixed feelings about.
“Early on, there was a strong connection in El Salvador with the government and Bitcoin,” Dennehy said.
“People who liked the government often liked Bitcoin. People who didn’t like the government often didn’t like Bitcoin. There were even people who thought Nayib Bukele invented Bitcoin. That was a common perception in those early days,” he added.
“So there’s a strong association that Bitcoin had with government. An early struggle was to show people that Bitcoin is separate. Bitcoin is independent. And so are we.”
Dennehy pointed out that this challenge still exists, especially since Mi Primer Bitcoin is now being used within the public school system in El Salvador.
“We always try to assert our independence, not only in actions but also in perception,” he explained.
“Working with government only increases the challenge of differentiating ourselves from government in the perception of others,” he added.
“One of the ways we address that first challenge of not being dependent on government is, as a matter of principle, we never accept government funding.”
Another challenge for Mi Primer Bitcoin is paying its 21 employees through a donation system. This challenge is compounded by the fact that the organization does not accept donations that have strings attached.
“We turn down most sponsorship offers,” Dennehy said. “We turn down four out of five sponsorship offers because four out of five come with strings attached.”
However, major institutions in the Bitcoin world have started easing some of the financial burden of Mi Primer Bitcoin.
“We receive subsidies from HRF, OpenSats And Block“, said Dennehy.
“All those things are without strings attached, and that’s great,” he added.
“I think grants will become a bigger part of the pie, but from the beginning until now, the majority of our funding has come from grassroots support.”
Mi Primer Bitcoin Goes Global
Mi Primer Bitcoin’s educational materials and curriculum are free to download and use. This has made it easy for teachers around the world to adopt the nonprofit’s curriculum.
And Mi Primer Bitcoin also supports its international teachers who are leading Bitcoin education efforts in their respective home countries, members of Mi Primer Bitcoin which the organization refers to as “Light nodes.”
“We have 33 hubs in 22 countries and we all come together to share best practices,” Dennehy explains.
“Maybe a teacher in Argentina will guest teach for a project that started in Colombia. We have a node in Cuba and a node in the Dominican Republic, and they actually teach together,” he added.
When I asked Dennehy how quickly Mi Primer Bitcoin’s model spreads on a scale of one to ten, he answered with a “10” without any hesitation. He also pointed out that trying to expand Mi Primer Bitcoin faster would only cause the institution to stray from its mission.
“I think the only way this can spread faster is if we compromise our values, if we centralize and dictate instead of decentralize and empower,” Dennehy said.
“We are trying to reimagine what is possible for the next generation, and that often means forging a new path. If we want to teach others that a different future is possible, we have to show it ourselves,” he added.
“What you say is not important, what you do is everything.”
Dennehy explained that Mi Primer Bitcoin has received 4 Light Node requests in the last 48 hours and he is surprised at how quickly things are moving.
He never dreamed that Mi Primer Bitcoin would grow so fast.
“I’m a dreamer. I’m an idealist. That’s why I’m here,” Dennehy said. “But if you had told me two and a half years ago that we would be teaching tens of thousands of students in person, and that we would be inspiring and helping dozens of other countries, I would have said, ‘No way. Maybe in 10 years.'”
Permanently mission-driven
Dennehy believes that Mi Primer Bitcoin needs to evolve further and that the organization itself needs to continue to emulate Bitcoin if it wants to stay true to its mission of helping others.
“Everything we do at Mi Primer Bitcoin, we try to learn from Bitcoin itself,” Dennehy said. “And decentralization is really important to us, because we want to empower others rather than control others.”
And his vision of what this empowerment looks like seems more refined than ever.
“Bitcoin education is a means to an end, and that end is empowerment,” Dennehy said.
“Once you realize that you have control over your money, that you could have more control over your present, that flips the incentive structure. In the fiat world, we’re discouraged from looking to the future, building, creating, because the rules of the game can change. I could start a business today, but the rules of the game that will profoundly affect its success or failure are not up to me and can change at any moment. So it encourages us to be followers rather than leaders,” he explained.
“Bitcoin is something that flips a switch from, ‘Okay, I could have more control over my money, which gives me more control over my present, which makes it easier to build into the future because I’m not at the whim of someone else.’ The more we can insert ourselves into determining our own destiny, the more we are encouraged and incentivized to look toward the future — to build and to create. That’s the goal, and Bitcoin education is the means to that end.”