Finding talent in the blockchain industry is no small challenge. Finding talent for a particular blockchain is even harder.

Despite Bitcoin being around for over a decade there really is a dearth of quality material to educate the next wave of Bitcoin entrepreneurs.

Initially the first people to become proficient at Bitcoin were people from quite a niche field of interest so as to be exposed to this newly distributed protocol.

A few hype cycles later and we saw more and more people finding the promise of blockchain enticing. By that time however, Satoshi had ceased any open involvement with the node software and departed from any kind of stewardship.

A hype of blockchain education

Naturally some institutions sprang up to position themselves as leaders in delivering content for blockchain careers, but unfortunately most of these programmes were delivering content based on several misconceptions and ideological appropriations of the Bitcoin system.

There was very little empiricism employed when developing these blockchain programmes and as such even in the content taught by some of the most prestigious institutes of technology, many fallacies and misunderstandings are present in their material.

The Bitcoin SV Academy was developed with this in mind.

The Bitcoin SV Academy

All the content which constitutes the course material available in the various streams has been thoroughly vetted by experts and is consistent with the Bitcoin white paper, The BitcoinSV wiki and strongly emphasises the importance of honest mining and regulatory compliance.

The BSV Academy has now produced several courses which when completed guarantee the student has a certain level of proficiency in understanding Bitcoin and several of the computer science techniques deployed within the system:

• Bitcoin theory
• Bitcoin development
• Bitcoin infrastructure
• Bitcoin enterprise
• Bitcoin Primitives: Hash Functions
• Bitcoin Primitives: Merkle Trees
• Bitcoin Primitives: Digital Signatures
• Bitcoin Basics: Protocol and Design

We need passionate educators to scale blockchain education

The team from the Academy have been pursued by many initiatives from around the world which seek to take a regional cohort through a programme to up-skill them in the hopes of them joining the next generation of blockchain builders or entrepreneurs.

Opportunities are arising in England, Australia and the US but also in countries such as Uganda, India, South Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan.

With some of these programmes aiming to deliver the Academy’s content to over 1,000,000 students, it’s a real challenge to find the right approach to scale.

Although the blockchain industry absolutely needs developers and IT specialists, what it also desperately needs is a strong community of blockchain educators, academics and researchers distributed around the world.

While it would be brilliant for every undergraduate student around the world to have access to the team of the BSV Academy for fielding questions and finding out best practices for blockchain development, it’s simply not feasible.

There needs to be a level of educator educating to distribute this task.

An opportunity to focus on blockchain as frontier topic for discipline-specific research

If the primary focus is only on getting developers skilled up to be able to build blockchain based applications, then those people are often going to be absorbed into businesses that leave very little time for them to transfer their knowledge to anyone other than members within their team.

What is needed is parallel cohorts of passionate educators to learn the material presented in the Academy courses so that they may all share a common foundational knowledge free from the fallacies and ideology that plagues the courses that were first set up without a real source of truth to build upon.

Blockchain has applications across every faculty of a University. In the future some aspect of it will be taught in the context of business, law, accounting, mathematics, IT, statistics, science, engineering, creative arts and communications.

When there is only a sole focus on educating developers, despite gaining technically competent employable builders, the industry at large doesn’t experience the same gains because there is no one who is advancing the knowledge base holistically.

There needs to be an effort to promote discipline-specific applications of blockchain as frontier topics for research. Opportunities abound for a journalism thesis on micropayments as a gating function for micropublishing, or for a music student to investigate the new models available for representing their compositions as an NFT or such.

These students will be setting themselves up for a rich vein to mine through research and inquiry, but they’ll really be limited by the availability of researchers who can act as supervisors with expertise in the blockchain technicalities.

The dean of each faculty of a university or college should be incentivising at least one researcher from their staff to prioritise the intersectionality of blockchain with their discipline.

Many of these ambitious researchers will quickly find that they are at the frontier of their entire field as they realise the power of a universal source of data integrity from a distributed timestamp server.

Society wins when education scales

This is where the big gains will be for society. There are very few people who benefit when a tech savvy developer creates a new range of NFTs or another arcade game that people play for a little while.

These innovations add up in aggregate and that’s great, but what would really advance society would be for the entrepreneurs outside of computer science to discover the potential of an unbounded and fully scalable Bitcoin.

Industry experts or academics who know the pain points of an engineer needing assurance signatures, or of a scientist synchronising a global data set, or of distributing computation for genetic modelling will be best suited to develop Bitcoin-based suites to address previously unsolvable problems.

This is where real infrastructure level innovations will occur however, there is a slim chance that these social boons will be imagined by someone with a computer science background tinkering with some new schema or tooling. Much more likely is that it will be by someone with industry specific knowledge who sees the opportunity.

It would be great if it was sooner rather than later that every University degree offered the elective of blockchain for engineers, blockchain for science, blockchain for law or whatever other faculty will find some applicability of the technology in their field.

Or better yet, that every student who wanted to research the intersection of blockchain and their field of inquiry could find a supervisor wherein they could then advance the collective knowledge base further.