WHY I CREATED SATS LEDGER
True story
As a kid, I loved saving. When I got pocket money, I would walk into our local village with my mum, deposit my coins into a Post Office savings account she set-up for me and watch as my savings book was updated and stamped by the cashier.
As I grew — little by little — my savings grew with me, and I got a thrill from seeing how the pretty healthy interest I earned made the numbers in my book go up.
It felt good.
But with low and 0% interest interest rates now the norm, the days of putting money into a savings account and watching it steadily grow appeared to be over.
Then Bitcoin came along, creating a promising new way to save for the future and opening the conversation about what money really is and how it should serve people and soceity.
Bitcoin isn’t easy to grasp at first, though, and there are very few tactile options available to help children to understand how it works. I realised this after I asked myself how I could start teaching my children about Bitcoin in a way that held meaning for them - that gave them some skin in the game but in a fun and worry-free way. So I dug out a couple of old notebooks and made v0.1 of the Sats Ledger; a simple, analogue version of Bitcoin’s digital ledger system which kids can use and interact with to literally get to grips with bitcoining — risk-free.
Start ‘em young
Understanding the mechanics and value of Bitcoin takes time. But it’s pretty easy when you break it down into small steps.
I designed Sats Ledgers to be a simple, fun and hands-on way for Bitcoin ‘Minors’ ;0) to conceptualise key bitcoin elements early, whilst incubating them from the high-stakes world of sovereign financial accountability — until you think they are ready.
Having used a prototype version of this system with my kids, I have seen how much fun Sats Ledgers are and how learning becomes an inevitable part of the process — without the (potentally off-putting) risk of any sats being lost. It’s reassuring for me and rewarding for them.
This may be a humble little book, but with the fun and motivating stickers that each pack comes with, it offers a basis to help you bring the Bitcoin experience to life for your special little saver. For example, they help to explain and/or practice:
Distributed ledger systems
Low-time preference + savings incentives
Self-custody vs 3rd party custody
Fault-tolerance/node-recovery
Block rewards + the Halving
Transaction verification
Difficulty adjustments
Bitcoin’s timechain (blockchain)
Proof-of-work
Immutability
I want these ledgers to help you to generate the same kind of interest in Bitcoin in your kids as it has done in mine. It’s time for us to rekindle the fires of low time preference thinking for the next generation of sats stackers and to make saving great again. That’s our mission.