Quote from: NeuroticFish on February 03, 2021, 08:13:36 AM

Imho it's not a good plan. The problem is that Bitcoin mining difficulty is very high and rising. That means that an old "unprofitable" ASIC will probably not get you almost any coins, or you'll need quite a number of generations of students to get to withdraw that dust.

If you want to teach students about mining, show them how mining works with any coin. You'll have to pick with every new generation a new worthless coin with low difficulty in order to show them everything, including hitting a block or at least receiving payout from the pool.

If you want to teach students about transferring Bitcoin, then imho your best bet is Bitcoin's testnet. This way they'll see the exact wallets they can use. And since Bitcoin Core needs very long initial sync and you'll probably want to have each student trying this on his computer, I think that a SPV wallet like Electrum would be more suitable, since it syncs fast and it can also work with testnet.

Paper wallets... they are kinda outdated if you want to show them in the "classic" way. Paper wallet is a nicely printed pair of private key + address. But nowadays it's easier and cleaner to introduced them to HD wallets and seed, which they can store instead of paper wallet, and with seed they'll have virtually infinite number of addresses, of which they can bookmark one or two and check on block explorers (there are also a few block explorers that can work with testnet too).

Thanks!
1) I understand the difficulty is high but running an old asic and maybe using Nicehash will accomplish the goal of making some sats while mining...it would be cool to for them to see some old ASICs running
2) I like the Testnet idea but I would love for them to walk away having actual sats. Imagine they are in college 2-3 years from now and they can say they got their first wallet in CS class and even had it funded

3) Software wallets are cool but hardware wallets cost money so that would be out
4) Paper wallets are outdated but are tangible and a great way to help them make the connection between pub/priv key...I actually plan to share with them a private key of a wallet that I will fund my self with $20 or so and have them race to see who can get it first