Viva la #GenerationBlockchain

Over 4,000 students and 500 schools across 117 countries.

The revolution will be decentralized.

About Me

My name is Erick Pinos. I like Iron Man, peanut butter, and blockchain. I got a glimpse of the rabbit hole in 2014 when the MIT Bitcoin Project airdropped $100 worth of Bitcoin to every MIT student. I slowly but surely descended into blockchain fanaticism when I learned about the world-changing ramifications of projects like Ethereum and Steem. I started trying every blockchain service I came across and kept a blog on Steemit. Fortunately, the rest of the world soon caught on. Inspired by Sia’s story of starting at HackMIT 2013, I did HackMIT 2017 in the hopes of kicking off my own project. Our team won the ConsenSys prize for best blockchain hack. We didn’t continue the project after but I did join the Digital Currency Initiative and did research on decentralized solar microgrids. I became president of the MIT Bitcoin Club, presided over the 2018 MIT Bitcoin Expo, and spent the majority of my time skipping class to travel to blockchain conferences and meeting everybody that I could. After graduating MIT, I became the CTO of Game Theory Group, a blockchain advisory firm and research center.

After an eight month soirée as the director of operations for BEN, I will be taking over the role of executive director from Jinglan Wang, who led BEN through it’s explosive growth in 2017 and 2018. She will continue being one of BEN’s most kickass advisors while she focuses on developing cryptoeconomics.study, the first open source course in the world dedicated to the emerging field of cryptoeconomics. She’ll also be working on Handshake, a decentralized solution to replace centralized Certificate Authorities and DNS by optimistically distributing ownership.

About BEN

BEN’s mission is to create an open and free world by promoting technological literacy through technological decentralization. Blockchain will free the flow of value across cyberspace like the Internet freed the flow of information. Blockchain is a tool for accessibility, banking the unbanked, democratizing access to financial instruments, reaching untapped markets, utilizing unused resources, and making digital cats.

BEN is a decentralized swarm. Read Swarmwise to understand.

Swarmification approved by Rick Falkvinge himself!

Rather than being a bloated centralized organization, BEN Global is a small task force of less than ten people who handle administrative duties. We instead put the power into our chapters across the world for them take effective action in their local communities.

About You

Another important lesson from Swarmwise: decentralized does not mean leaderless. But we’re not talking about us. We’re talking about you. If you consider yourself a newcomer to the blockchain space, pat yourself on the back because we are already old news. It is not about us anymore. There are millions of wide eyed eager freshmen going to colleges worldwide in the fall during one of the most transformative and exploratory period of their lives. In the past semester alone blockchain clubs within universities have grown ten fold. We’ve signed up hundreds of new BEN members and dozens of new chapters. It’s time for us to be the leaders, the teachers, the mentors, the supporters, and the enablers of the incoming wave of #GenerationBlockchain.

Call to Action

1. Tweet what #GenerationBlockchain means to you and what you are going to do about it.
2. Join our Discord and introduce yourself in our general and regional channels.
3. Donate! Don’t just clap (if this was Steem, then upvotes would be donations hmmmm maybe Steem is onto something). BEN is a 501c3 nonprofit organization entirely funded by donations. Send 0.003 BTC or 0.06 ETH (<$25), so that we can empower our chapters to educate and engage the public about blockchain technology. Oh, and donations to BEN are tax deductible so you can write it off your crypto gainz. Contact us at erick@blockchainedu.org for any questions you may have.

We have new initiative and partnership announcements coming up over the next couple of weeks. Join the Blockchain Education Network. Join #GenerationBlockchain