You can’t teach your kids proper financial responsibility while paying them in smelly old fiat money! The money in your child’s piggy bank is inflating away – its time to educate children about Bitcoin.
Paying for chores and allowance is a fun/easy way to teach your kids about crypto:
Get An OpenDime
Opendimes are small stick drives which work as a one time use hardware wallet. The first time you plug it in, a private key and public key is generated. You can then print out the QR code so bitcoin hodling parents, grandparents and friends can easily scan the code with their mobile wallet to deposit bitcoin into your child’s OpenDime.
When you’re ready to “withdraw” the bitcoin, you poke a hole in the OpenDime to access the private key. Sort of like smashing a piggy bank! With that private key you can import it into your favorite wallet of choice.
It’s a good idea to set your kid up with a read-only wallet, or bookmark a link to their public address in a block explorer so they can cross reference the transactions recorded in their Sats Ledger.
Keep a Sats Ledger
Sats Ledgers are a pair of booklets (called nodes) + sticker pack specifically designed to teach your children proper record keeping while also introducing them to the inner workings of Bitcoin along the way.
One booklet is for you, and one booklet is for them. Every time they complete a chore or get paid an allowance, you can deposit bitcoin into their OpenDime, record the transaction in the Sats Ledger and then sync up your nodes to keep everyone honest.
Payments & Rewards
Once 12 payments have been recorded in the Sats Ledger they’ve mined their first block! You can pay your child the agreed upon block reward and let them choose from 45+ stickers that come with every pack of Sats Ledgers.
Cashing Out
At some point, your kids are going to want to spend those hard earned sats. In a perfect world they could buy what they want directly with bitcoin! But more than likely they’ll need to exchange their bitcoin for fiat money.
Now’s the fun part – you get to buy the bitcoin back from them! This is also a good time teach them about exchange rates. Compare the value of sats earned to the amount exchanged ~ hopefully it’s appreciated!
Finally, be a good parent and stash those hard earned sats away in a College Savings account on your hardware wallet. If you’re lucky, maybe your kids will pay their way through college themselves via hard work and sound hodling.
Written by: @gerbz Gerbz is the founder of BitLift and has been journeying down the crypto rabbit hole since 2013.