ZoneBitcoin EditorialI read this article and I really liked it. From Ghana to the Bronx, these teen bitcoiners are building the future » . So, I decided to translate it because I know that it will interest a lot of our readers looking for inspiration on ZoneBitcoin.
From Ghana to the Bronx, these teenage Bitcoiners are building the future
In fact, the article also shows young people from countries other than the Ghana
Jemima Joseph, 18, takes a summer job as a social media manager at a crypto startup after graduating from high school in the Bronx. She learned how to make her first cryptocurrency transaction, a zcash purchase, with the mobile app Flexa.
It was a hot summer day when Joseph joined 10 other teenagers inside the BXL business incubator in a rundown neighborhood in the South Bronx. Their former high school English teacher, Carlos Acevedo, held two-day workshops for students.
Emmanuel Ntiamoab, 18, soon to be a computer science student at the University of Buffalo, sits near Jemina during the conference.
“As students in the South Bronx, we don’t often get the opportunity to be a part of something bigger,” Ntiamoab said. “So if this cryptocurrency is really like the internet, I want to learn how to be a part of it. I’m interested in its development.”
Many of these students come from immigrant communities, Ghanaians, Jamaicans, Nigerians and Dominicans. Additionally, even among American students, there are several Puerto Ricans. Most of them work after school to help their families. They are familiar with cross-border payments within emigrant communities. It is indeed very common for the diaspora to send money to family back home. What they didn't yet know were the different tools available today to facilitate the transfer of money abroad.
“There’s a large population of unbanked and underbanked people here, too,” Acevedo told CoinDesk. “They’re paying eviction fees. … There are fewer bank branches in the Bronx than any other borough in the city.”
It's true. The streets outside are full of places to get loans, sell jewelry and send payments abroad, all with brightly colored signs listing the fees.
Josh Swihart, vice president of marketing for Electric Coin Company, told CoinDesk that each student received a small stipend of Zcash for taking the workshop.
“I would love to see this replicated in other cities,” Swihart told CoinDesk. “We’ve already had questions about Oakland.”
Although Joseph already had a summer job in the industry, several other students wanted to find an internship or stay after for business coaching from the BXL business incubator.
They have now joined dozens of teenagers around the world who have told CoinDesk about their plans to join the cryptocurrency industry, starting with using crypto assets to further their own education.
Jemima Joseph is always learning more about Zcash with his friend Joswald Batista, who is just starting out in the crypto space.
(Photo by Leigh Cuen for CoinDesk)
What is the background of these teenagers interested in crypto?
That's what Anish Agnihotri, The 16-year-old Toronto-based developer told CoinDesk that he continues to participate in open source projects since he discovered bitcoin in 2015.
“I love that anyone, anywhere can connect with such a welcoming community of builders,” Agnihotri said. “I've worked with people from Africa, Mexico, China, through things like Bitcoin.” /// Gitcoin is a freelancer platform (Editor's note).
Talha Atta, a 17-year-old Toronto resident, told CoinDesk he was immediately inspired when he learned about bitcoin in 2017.
“Remittances, being able to transfer money abroad without any fees, would really help my family in Pakistan,” Atta said. “I just want to find the right technology to solve problems and reduce inequality.”
It has already started experimenting with such use cases. Earlier this year, Atta won a hackathon with friends by creating an IOTA-powered micropayments system for people without Wi-Fi to rely on other users' connections.
Whether it's starting their own business, studying computer science, interning, contributing to open source projects on GitHub, or helping educate their peers, here are 10 more teens to remember as they grow in the crypto ecosystem:
Few bitcoiners are as active as the founder of BlockXAfrica, aged only 17. The Ghanaian company Akyaw organizes educational meetings in an electronic newsletter and a Telegram group with nearly 300 subscribers, as well as 16 teenage volunteers who help organize meetings.
“We work on content in local languages and our English content is always based on local examples and things relevant to the average Ghanaian,” he said.
Akyaw steps up BlockXAfrica programming this year at Ghana, with plans for a hackathon, a developer training program and an online course by 2020. He said the developer training would focus on cryptocurrency usage applications that already leverage the interfaces known to the local community.
“Africans are more accustomed to sending money through mobile numbers than email addresses,” he said. Eventually, his goal is to turn BlockXAfrica into a monetized business, with paid training and exclusive content. Until then, the group is working to disseminate high-quality information and combat the myth that all cryptocurrencies are “scams,” he said.
At the age of 16, this entrepreneur from Saharanpur, northern India, has already sold her mobile application Crypto Price Tracker, which monitors 1 cryptocurrencies across 000 exchanges in 20 languages, at Redwood City Ventures.
The iOS app maps the price of bitcoin in 32 different currencies. Her global, friendly focus earned her the “woman of the year” award at a CryptoChicks conference in Toronto in April.
Despite death threats and cyberbullying, Arora continues to work with Redwood City Ventures to perfect the product, which has already been downloaded by more than 25 people.
Instead of letting the trolls take her down, Arora used her winnings to buy textbooks and apply for an O-1A visa to stay and work in the United States. She has since moved to San Francisco and hopes to stay in the cryptocurrency industry.
Now its second application, Cryptos Stickers, offers over 50 iMessage stickers linked to various cryptographic mementos.
3. Anand Patel
In London, wizard Anand Patel has helped at least 10 people set up their own personal nodes for various cryptocurrencies, in addition to around XNUMX people using his scripts to run nodes.
“For Bitcoin, I fell in love with it,” Patel told CoinDesk. “I wanted to make more of an impact on new technology and help different communities by creating installation scripts to simplify the process for new users trying to set up miners and full nodes.”
Since discovering bitcoin four years ago, Patel has graduated from the blockchain workshop run by Bitcoin Core contributor Jimmy Song.
“I had the basic skills, so I thought I should just experiment, see what was out there, use different people’s software and learn the process,” he said, adding that he was inspired to help facilitate “a new generation of entrepreneurs who value freedom and co-creation through decentralization.”
4. Kiki Pichini
Meanwhile, in the US state of Washington, a 15-year-old figure skater begins research to develop a blockchain application aimed at local fruit producers and sellers.
Pichini's interest in distributed databases began while working with his father to create a community registry of ice skating competitions and opportunities. Additionally, she started trading bitcoin with her parents as a learning exercise.
After attending Song's Bitcoin seminar, Pichini noticed that all the farmers and packing houses in his town were transporting cherries and apples across the country.
“Especially here in Washington, there are a lot of people who are mining [bitcoin],” she told CoinDesk. “I think [bitcoin] could actually be used as a payment method, especially in the wholesale sector. … I think I would like to start my own company and blockchain would be a part of it.”
5. Ian Lim
Minneapolis native Lim bought his first bitcoin in 2016, after hearing about it from friends at school, and quickly became a regular at local bitcoin meetups.
When Lim's mother suffered serious health problems after several strokes, he wondered how to apply his knowledge of the ethics of bitcoin to the healthcare industry.
“In general, what I want is to be at the forefront of blockchain technology in the healthcare sector,” Lim told CoinDesk. “Being at home was the best thing I could have done, instead of just reading books, but also meeting people who have experience in this field.”
Mr. Lim then won a hackathon organized by Startup Weekend in Minneapolis in 2017 with a Hyperledger-based blockchain solution called BlocVac, which allows patients to store and share their own vaccination records. Since then, Lim has presented his blockchain experiments at universities such as MIT and community events with Techstars.
“I consider myself an entrepreneur first and foremost,” Lim said, “which is common for people who use [blockchain]-related applications.”
This Londoner became known in March 2018 when he discovered a flaw in Ledger's hardware wallet. His blog about the vulnerability propelled him to Twitter fame, with some conspiracy theorists suggesting the teenage hacker works for rival startup Trezor.
In reality, Rashid contributed code to Trezor's firmware to enhance security, although he is not officially involved with the company, and occasionally submits contributions to open source projects such as Bitcoin Core and Zcash.
“When you look at history, or even current global affairs in less fortunate places, you can see where bitcoin could be applied to actually improve people’s lives,” Rashid told CoinDesk.
Its goal is to help improve “the security and usability of private key management” in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
At the moment, Rashid prefers to study and experiment on his own rather than joining a startup or starting his own business.
“I would like to explore privacy-enhancing proposals, such as zero-knowledge proofs used in zcash,” he said.
7. Chanan Sack
In Israel, Sack, 18, is self-employed. He teaches developers about smart contracts and writes research reports for startups. So far, eight developers have completed his Ethereum course, which is personalized for each client. He developed the core curriculum while teaching himself how to deploy Ethereum code in early 2017.
“You meet a lot of interesting people,” Sack told CoinDesk, speaking about the Ethereum and Bitcoin communities. “These issues really matter. It's the Internet disrupting something very inherent: money, programmable money. It makes me want to spend my time in there, because there is a lot to do here.
Several of the 25 students who attended Sack's lectures at Tel Aviv University are now working on their own open source applications. One of these students even participated in the winning team of the 2018 Tel Aviv-Bitcoin Embassy hackathon in Tel Aviv, as part of a project related to the Lightning Network, a scaling solution for Bitcoin.
Since then, he has also contributed to Andreas Antonopoulos' GitHub resources for Ethereum developers and created a lightningwall as an experiment.
“We had a great time. It really helped me with my research,” Sacks said of the wallet he developed with friends at a hackathon in Tel Aviv. He hopes to continue working freelance in the industry and contributing to the open source projects that fascinate him.
8. Ben Kaufman
DAOstack developer Kaufman, 18, began contributing to Ethereum open source projects in January 2018, after two years of researching the space.
“I also like the community and the openness of the platform,” Kaufman told CoinDesk. “I’ve already suggested an EIP [Ethereum] improvement proposal.”
Kaufman dropped out of his junior year of high school to start working full-time as a freelance mobile app developer at Tel Avivian startups. But getting banking services has become a nuisance for the prodigy's parents.
“As a teenager, I had a lot of trouble with banks,” Kaufman said. “The concept of bitcoin, which allows me to control my own financial assets, is very inspiring to me.”
In addition to leading ethereum workshops for over 100 students at Le Wagon coding school in Tel Aviv, Kaufman is currently researching the Lightning network.
“I’m really interested in how the Lightning Network can bring bitcoin to more widespread adoption,” he said. “I’m currently trying to figure out how I could build something along those lines.”
9.Alex Sicart Ramos
When Ramos graduated from high school in 2018, he quickly launched his second startup, Shasta. The idea came to this Spanish entrepreneur because his first start-up, Sharge, which had earned him a place among the 30-30 in the European technology sector ranking, could not take off in the face of regulatory problems linked to cars electrical and energy.
Ramos first heard about cryptocurrency in 2015 at Tim Draper's coworking space in Silicon Valley. In 2018, a team of five helped Ramos launch the Ethereum-based Shasta project with a solar-powered pilot in a small Spanish village. Ramos said nearly 2 people have used the testnet so far.
“It’s a platform that allows consumers and suppliers to connect within a DAO [decentralized autonomous organization],” Ramos told CoinDesk. “You can manage all the payments and revenue, everything that happens in that marketplace. … If we think it makes sense to create a utility token within that program. If it really makes sense, we’ll do it. If not, we’ll raise money from traditional investors.”
10. Gerald Nash
Gerald Nash, 19, a computer science student, previously interned at Coinbase. In addition, he has directed several programs at Blockchain Lab at Howard University.
“A lot of students around me have randomly closed or frozen their Venmo or PayPal accounts, even though there’s nothing suspicious,” Nash told CoinDesk. “The big thing that’s inspired me the most is the idea of monetary sovereignty.”
Nash first discovered bitcoin on Reddit in 2013, while he was still in high school in Atlanta, Georgia. Now he hosts events on campus to teach students how to manage bitcoin wallets.
“I primarily follow bitcoin and ethereum as two of my favorite projects,” he said. “I think over the next five years, [crypto] will provide more technical users with greater financial inclusion. … People will have easier access to mobility and growth of their money.”
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