A camper holds up an example of “fiat money” at the Crypto Kids Camp in San Pedro, California.
Photo: Maggie Shannon
At a summer camp in Los Angeles this week, the kids enjoyed a petting zoo, drank from crates of juice during snack time, and played a game that included dozens of balls being thrown onto a parachute.
And they learned about bitcoin.
As a sign of the bubbling enthusiasm for digital currencies, the Crypto Kids Camp began on Monday in a warehouse in a lively port district. Over five days, the camp combines activities that would be common in any summer camp with a crash course on how to think about, buy, and even mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
This week, 26 children aged 5 to 17 participated with the idea that nobody is too young to get into the Bitcoin economy. Most were not white as part of a deliberate push by the organizers.
“Most of us grew up in school and no one ever taught us how money worked,” said Najah Roberts, who is Black, who founded camp as a way to bridge the racial wealth gap. “So we really overlooked the importance of saving and investing and how these things come about.”
The camp is part of a trend that is causing young adults and even children to immerse themselves in cryptocurrency through online trading exchanges, school clubs, social media, and other media. In Georgia, state lawmakers this year considered a bill requiring high school students to take a course on personal finance, including cryptocurrency.
Najah J. Roberts speaks to campers.
Photo: Maggie Shannon
And although coding camps for learning computer programming have been around for many years, Bitcoin camps are relatively new.
Roberts, 50, founded her charitable camp in 2019 after several years as a Bitcoin investor and entrepreneur. She owns a store in nearby Inglewood where people can get personal help buying two digital currencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum – an unusual retail presence for a digital currency exchange.
This week marked a return for the warehouse, which, like many, closed during the pandemic, and Roberts said she was determined that the children get exposed early on to topics like the history of money and how forex trading works – especially those of Black, Latino, or other communities that she said were less likely to learn about digital currencies through family, friends, or school.
“This is what we have to focus on: bringing this to the city centers so that children can take their breaks to get a taste of emerging technologies,” she said. “We really wanted to help the black and brown communities fill the wealth gap.”
The children visit the camp for a week-long session where they learn about a different emerging technology each day.
Roberts has an acronym, BEASTMODE, to keep track of the range of material they cover: Blockchain, Evolution of Money, Artificial Intelligence, Security (Cyber), Technology (Virtual Reality), Mining and Machine Learning, Online Games, Drones and technology.
Campers that week included children from Texas and New Jersey who were staying in hotel rooms with their parents, she said.
A camper is playing with a stubborn goat.
Photo: Maggie Shannon
There is no minimum age to buy or own an online token like Bitcoin, nor is there any minimum age to hold US dollars and cents. Many cryptocurrency exchanges have a minimum age in their terms of use, often 18 years old, and enforce the requirement through bank-like know-your-customer rules, but not all exchanges do this.
Cryptocurrencies have been on a wild ride over the past year, with many rising and falling sharply within a few months. And while skepticism about cryptocurrencies remains high, some in the tech industry remain convinced that they will be a big part of the future. Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms, said Thursday it raised $ 2.2 billion for a new fund focused on cryptocurrencies and related technologies.
According to a survey of 7,000 US teenagers by investment bank Piper Sandler this year, around 9 percent of teenagers say they have traded cryptocurrencies. 81 percent of them are male, the bank found.
And for some young people, an online wallet for Bitcoin is much more exciting than the old alternative: a traditional “child savings account” at a commercial bank that is opened with the consent and supervision of a parent or legal guardian.
“It is the digital currency that will conquer this universe,” said Ashlynne Whitt, who attended Roberts’ first Crypto Kids Camp two years ago at the age of 16. Now 18, she said the camp taught her how to build a mining machine from scratch. helps her make $ 200.
“It expanded my mind,” she said.
Her mother, Angelique Johnson, was also impressed.
“I’m sure the Girl Scouts are giving tech classes, but that’s one on one and the speakers have been phenomenal,” she said. “If that could be duplicated in every city it would be so great.”
Campers at Crypto Kids Camp in San Pedro, California.
Photo: Maggie Shannon
Whitt now works for Roberts and plans to attend Santa Monica College this fall to study computer science while trying to increase the popularity of digital currencies.
“My friends, you view money differently than just buying the newest pair of shoes,” she said. “Bitcoin, it’s going somewhere. Every company and business will accept Bitcoin or some type of digital currency. ”
Roberts’ camp may be the only one of its kind in the US, although it is starting to inspire others, especially among black Bitcoin investors.
Isaiah Jackson, author of Bitcoin & Black America and Bitcoin podcaster, said he plans to sign up for an online-only cryptocurrency camp in July next week. Part of the motivation, he said, is to make sure that black teens aren’t left behind in an emerging field like they were when the internet evolved. No big tech CEOs are black, he noted.
“If Bitcoin is to go mainstream, blacks have to be involved, so we have to start now,” he said. “Bitcoin is literally made for us to be sovereign.”
The camp will use a child-focused book, Bitcoin Elementary. And the final project at the camp will be to create a non-fungible token, or NFT, a digital file like a work of art that is certified as unique using blockchain technology.
Square, a San Francisco-based digital payments company, has pledged to fund the camp, Jackson said, and is looking for more donations. His camp is aimed at children in grades 6 through 10 – an age at which they have already gained experience with online tokens through gaming platforms like Roblox, he said.
“You saw digital money. You understand. And you just have to put them on the right track and teach them what to do, ”he said.
“Parents should teach them to be accountable just like any other form of money, but I don’t think anyone should be prevented from owning Bitcoin,” he said.
Some of the kids attending cryptocurrency summer camps have been kicked off by their parents, said Maunda Land, a Florida consultant and investor who launched an online-only camp this week. Of the five students in her first camp, four had parents who owned digital currency, she said.
And since the students are minors, they may need their parents’ help to fund their digital wallet through a bank account or other payment method first, she said.
“Her homework was to get her wallet financed,” she said. But already, she added, “A couple of them had a little crypto that their parents bought for them.”
At the Los Angeles camp, the children showed how much they already knew. When Roberts asked them at the beginning of the camp if they could name some types of cryptocurrencies, they called out several, including Dogecoin and the Shiba Inu token.
She also spent time going through the history of the currency and explaining how its trade evolved over time from bartering animals to using clams as money to printing paper money backed by governments.
Ciris Hendricks, the camp’s chief operations officer, said they had planned more children to attend if it weren’t for the uncertainty about Covid-19 and local health regulations. Finally, they want to encourage public schools to introduce similar programs, not just in Los Angeles but across the country.
“We want to set it up so that it is in every city,” she said.
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