MinorMiner: We turn your kid's maths homework into Bitcoin

Summary

Hello! Hello! Welcome, welcome. My name is Hobert Reaton, and I’m here in this shabby motel conference room to present you with yet another once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. Look at this picture. Tell me what you see: Do you see learning? Self-improvement? The future leaders of our country? I’ll tell you what I see: wasted computing power. Between the ages of 5 and 18, the average child in full-time education completes about 5 maths worksheets a week. Each worksheet has 20 questions. This means that over the course of their school career, every single one of our kids performs about 80,000 calculations. At the moment we completely waste their work. A student figures out that 5+5=10 and 7x7=49. This motivates them; they’re energised by their success. But then what do we do with the fruits of their labour? Nothing! We throw the fruit away, to rot in the void. “We knew that already,” we tell our children. “Your ideas don’t matter.” Unlike the rest of society, I believe that kids deserve to feel appreciated. I believe that their achievements are valuable. That’s why I founded MinorMiner. What is MinorMiner? MinorMiner is a platform that allows school-age children to monetise their maths homework by using it to mine Bitcoin. Yes, you heard me. We send children their homework, they crunch through it, and then together we transform their sweat into digital gold. This isn’t some rinky-dink incentive program where we bribe children to care about multiplication. Homework is the essential raw material that feeds our machine. We need these kids. No kids; no Bitcoin. In order to understand the innovation that makes MinorMiner possible, we first need to understand how Bitcoin is mined today. Right now, people mine Bitcoin by using computers to solve complex mathematical puzzles. The puzzles look like this: Take the list of the Bitcoin transactions that have occurred since the last Bitcoin was mined. Check that they’re all correctly authorized and that none of them spend m...