10 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 31 Oct 2023 \ on: Imagine you have $55 million to make bitcoin a success. How do you deploy it? bitcoin
Fund 20 $50k bounties to create btc-focused university-level classes on assorted topics across the sciences and humanities. The point isn't to create classes about btc for the sake of btc, but rather to create classes in key fields that illustrate those topics with first-rate btc material. Students who don't necessarily care about btc would take the classes because they're really effective for teaching some key topic area. They would emerge with btc knowledge as a trojan horse.
It's not hard to think of technical classes in {algorithms, cryptography, distributed systems, software engineering} that could include a significant btc component, but the really interesting place to include it would be the non-economic social sciences. Everyone who's gone deep down the rabbit hole comes to understand how profound are the implications of money in general, and btc in particular, across a host of domains. Having quality content that foregrounded btc's relationship to history, psychology, sociology, communications, anthropology, and political science would be super interesting.
Making classes that were fully academically credible and that came with free materials, detailed syllabi, good problem sets, and high-quality instruction available free to everyone would orange pill a host of people who may not otherwise wind up orange-pilled. I think this is a major weakness of existing educational material -- the classes I know of start from the premise that btc is the most amazing things and you already want to learn about it. The audience who meets that criterion is severely limited. Far better to spread the conceptual underpinnings of btc to anybody who wants to learn the things that come as part of a standard university education -- that would be a million bucks well spent.