BTCManager has been following Mathbot for a while now, and we are reposting this Medium entry by Anders Kargaard to raise awareness of Mathbot, which is using bitcoin in a unique way to promote education.
We are used to hearing stories about established men from the legacy system telling us how terrible Bitcoin is for the world. The only thing it is good for is money laundry, drugs, terrorism etc. As Andreas Antonopoulos says, then Bitcoin would not be real money, if it could not be used for those purposes. Real money can be used in general. Surprise.
Guess what is still the biggest currency used for those illegal activities? Normal fiat currencies.
Bitcoin can bring so much more positive to the world than negative. I have always felt that, but recently I got involved with a project, where a specific use case stared me right in the face.
https://mathbot.com (still very early stage) is a website, where kids and adults from anywhere around the world can go and learn math and programming. This is done by programming a robot to solve first very simple tasks to increasingly more complicated tasks. It is a game. It is fun. This is free for everyone and will no doubt have a positive impact on the world. Where does Bitcoin come in?
If parents wants to incentivize kids, they can pay any amount they like and feel is sufficient and then the kid will earn back 90 percent of that amount at each level they pass. This carrot might go a long way in the industrialized world, where kids have a lot of choices of things to do and games to play, which can be hard to compete with for an educational game. Enter Bitcoin.
If this payment from parents to the open source organisation was with credit cards, then charge back fraud would absolutely finish off the project financially. Bitcoin is non-reversible transactions and thereby enables this project to exist and finance the development of a game that hopefully will have a lot of positive impact in this world.
Already it is a huge advantage for merchants to receive non-reversible transaction, but it is the first time, where I have seen that a positive impact project would otherwise not even have been possible. Thanks to Satoshi for making this a better world!
The end.
No need to read any further, the rest is just personal.
When I was a kid my grandfather offered me that for each multiplication table I would learn, he would pay me 20 Danish Krones. At the time (before money printing inflation) that was a good amount for a young boy. So my sister would teach me and I would rehearse and then go for the test. I loved it. I learned the multiplication tables and made a buck at the same time. If a financial incentive can work for me, it will also work for other. Maybe not all, but for some. I am pretty optimistic about that.
I was bored in kindergarden and wanted to start in school one year earlier than what the law prescribed. So I convinced my parents to go talk to the school and to convince them to let a motivated kid start earlier. I was naturally told that certainly NOT was going to be the case. I had to start at the same age as everyone else. Somebody wants to learn and you squash it? How dare you!?
At least if someone could have given me Mathbot, then I could just have learning math and programming. And you know what, by the time I started school I could be helping the teacher, because there is no one holding you back saying that you can only learn one year of math per year. Scary thought right? I could have progressed to high level math before starting school. Why don’t we offer this opportunity to our kids?
Going through 1st to 9th grade in Denmark, they were not allowed to do split education. I was not challenged enough so by the time I reached high school math all of a sudden went from super easy to pretty hard. I wish I could constantly have been challenged at the level where I was. This is another problem that Mathbot solves.
But hey, it is free to play, why don’t you test it out and let us know if there are any bugs still to be fixed. We might just all learn something 😉
The post Positive Bitcoin Use Case Otherwise Not Possible appeared first on BTCMANAGER.
Source: BTCManager.com
Original Post: Positive Bitcoin Use Case Otherwise Not Possible
