Education
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Trezor launches education initiative in Africa, funds Bitcoineta trip
Trezor has officially launched its educational program in Africa in addition to funding the local Bitcoin awareness campaign, Bitcoineta, and the Africa Bitcoin Conference.
The hardware cryptocurrency wallet firm Trezor has continued its efforts to promote Bitcoin (BTC) education globally by launching a new educational initiative in Africa.
The Trezor Academy was officially launched at the Trezor-backed Africa Bitcoin Conference in Ghana’s capital of Accra on Dec.
The academy is an educational program focused on spreading Bitcoin knowledge in Africa.
According to Trezor’s blog, the Trezor Academy pilot has been active in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, Burundi and Kenya.
“Bitcoin adoption is perhaps more relevant in Africa than on any other continent,” Trezor CEO Matej Zak said, adding that its properties provide several benefits related to local initiatives like payment schemes, microfinancing and savings.
As part of Trezor’s education program in Africa, the firm also funds Bitcoineta, a Bitcoin-themed car dedicated to spreading Bitcoin awareness in the West African region, particularly in Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. The Bitcoineta awareness program was originally launched in 2018 by non-profits Bitcoin Argentina and Bitcoin Americana, with the campaign’s name referring to an abbreviation from “Bitcoin” and “camioneta,” the Spanish word for minivan.
Related: South African regulator may license 36 crypto companies in December
Institute for blockchain and crypto research opens in France
The Institute of Crypto-Assets held a formal opening at the Léonard de Vinci center in the business district just outside of Paris.
On Nov. 8, the first-of-its-kind Institute of Crypto-Assets held a formal opening at the Léonard de Vinci center in the business district just outside of Paris.
The Institute will support and conduct research related to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Its scientific board includes 11 experts from major French educational institutions, such as the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and École polytechnique. A committee of 6 practitioners, including co-founder of Ledger, Nicolas Bacca, and founder of the crypto exchange Paymium, Pierre Noizat, will also oversee the work of the Institute.
According to Cyril Grunspan, the director of the Cryptoassets Institute, it will focus primarily on educational goals:
“Our goal is not to lobby but to create a forum for discussion on cryptoassets.”
Two lectures accompanied the opening: historian Jacques Favier spoke about the history of currencies up to Bitcoin, and cryptographer David Pointcheval ruminated on zero-knowledge proofs and anonymity. The Institute is going to hold such public events regularly.
Related: Bitcoin-centric AI language model aims to drive BTC education and adoption
France is actively pursuing a leadership role in Europe regarding digital economy and innovations. In September, the local telecommunications group Iliad revealed an investment of 100 million euros ($106 million) to fund the creation of an “excellence lab” dedicated to AI research in Paris. In addition to the lab, Iliad has acquired what it deemed as “the most powerful cloud-native AI supercomputer deployed to date in Europe.”
Amid the market crisis of the first half of 2023, French crypto businesses grabbed 27% of all the new investment deals struck in the fintech sector.
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Base network launches 8-week training course for blockchain developers
Base Bootcamp will offer students weekly meetings with a mentor, a dedicated Discord server, and access to Coinbase and Base engineers, the team stated.
On October 20, the team behind Ethereum layer-2 Base network announced that it's launching an eight-week training course to turn traditional software developers into blockchain developers. Called “Base Bootcamp,” the new program doesn't cost anything to attend. However, it's designed for “mid to senior level Software Engineering individual contributors” and students must fill out an application and be accepted to enroll. Less than 20 students will be accepted into each “cohort” or class, and the team will stop accepting applications on October 27, the announcement stated.
Introducing Base Bootcamp, an eight-week program designed to turn experienced developers into smart contract developers
— Base ️ (@BuildOnBase) October 20, 2023
Base Bootcamp will make learning interactive and collaborative, with support from experienced engineers and dedicated mentorshttps://t.co/gecI1FMpzT
In its announcement, Base claimed the program is necessary because most software developers still do not know how to build Web3 apps. “Today, there are fewer than 30,000 onchain developers,” they stated, “compared to nearly 30 million software developers.” This implies that only 0.1% of software developers work in Web3.
The team released an online training program called “Base Camp” earlier in the year, which was open to anyone. But they decided that this wasn’t enough, as “keeping the momentum to learn a complex new skill alone can be difficult.” They claim that Base Bootcamp will provide more support for developers who don’t want to study alone.
Related: Coinbase open sources code for layer-2 network Base
The Base Bootcamp will pair each student with a mentor who they will meet with each week. It will also give them access to a group of Coinbase and Base engineers who will be available during office hours to answer questions. A private Discord server will be created to allow students to communicate with each other and to Base engineers, and additional assignments will be given that will be graded by members of the team. At the end of the program, students will be required to create their own Web3 app and present it to other students.
Although the program does not charge tuition, students are required to put up 1 Ether (ETH) on deposit to ensure that they finish the program. The team claimed that this deposit will be returned to the student upon graduation.
The lack of qualified Web3 developers is a commonly reported problem in the industry. Some Australian educators have suggested teaching Web3 development in high schools as a means of combating the problem. Other companies have tried to create tools to make Web3 development more simple. For example, Circle recently released a set of tools that allow developers to deploy contracts using familiar Web2 methods.
Bitcoin-centric AI language model aims to drive BTC education and adoption
Spirit of Satoshi is a novel AI language model trained on seminal Bitcoin resources to drive education and power BTC-related products and services.
“It’s good at answering Bitcoin and economics-related questions, at least better than GPT-4”, Aleksandar Svetski tells Cointelegraph at a bustling Bitcoin Amsterdam.
The entrepreneur, author and founder of Spirit of Satoshi, a novel AI large language model (LLM), begins to unpack the arduous journey his small startup has undertaken to create its Bitcoin-centric AI chatbot.
The model is the result of a time-consuming training process to generate responses based on reputable Bitcoin resources, the Austrian school of economics and libertarian ideals. Still in its infancy, Spirit of Satoshi reflects ideals from a “well-curated Bitcoin corpus” including resources like Saifedean Ammous’ best-seller The Bitcoin Standard.
Svetski explains that the major difficulty in building the model was not just curating relevant sources of information from books, research papers to podcasts, but guiding the model to generate responses through an exhaustive training process. He adds that a common misconception of LLMs is that they’re sourcing information like a search engine:
“They are just probabilistically stringing words together in a way that is representative of the patterns within the model. So it's not even sourcing anything.”
It’s part of the reason why AI chatbots tend to “hallucinate” from time to time, Svetski explains, and why developing an LLM requires a focus on training it on a style of answering. Spirit of Satoshi is by no means perfect either, at least not in its current iteration:
“Our model will also hallucinate. It's also going to talk shit, but it's going to say something more like a Bitcoiner would say.”
Having established a broad but targeted base of Bitcoin-centric information and data, Svetski’s team has set about feeding the model tens of thousands of questions and answer pairs using programmatic methods. However, a human element is still required to help Spirit of Satoshi generate responses that might have come from its namesake.
Related: Bitcoin Amsterdam: BTC shines in depths of crypto bear market
The ongoing development of the model is leaning on the wider Bitcoin community as a result. Spirit of Satoshi employs an incentive process that allows the public to verify, create and validate data for the model.
Using credentials from the Lightning Network, Nostr or email addresses, a “proof of knowledge” mechanism allows users to get paid in satoshis for helping train the model.
The process uses a consensus model that will automatically impose a penalty if users are creating “junk data”. Svetski describes it as the crucial “human” element to improve Spirit of Satoshi’s outputs:
“It's producing incredible content, it’s the last piece to take your content from 80% good to 95% good. And that has a huge impact on the quality of the model.”
The difference between responses generated by Spirit of Satoshi and ChatGPT is palpable, according to Svetski. The latter is trained on mainstream ideas of what Bitcoin and concepts like inflation are:
“If we ask ChatGPT about inflation, it will tell you it is a sign of a healthy economy. Well, it’s not, inflation is the sign of systemic problems, like your purchasing power decreasing.”
Svetski says this scenario was part of the raison d'être behind Spirit of Satoshi, retraining the LLM to reflect the nuances that embody the type of thinking behind the Bitcoin movement:
“If you ask about inflation, our model should say ‘no, inflation is actually bad for the economy because it disincentivizes savings’ or ‘savings have a knock-on effect on people's time preference’.”
The future of the platform is fairly open-ended according to its founder. Spirit of Satoshi could be a learning tool, or online tutor embedded into educational platforms or online universities. It could also be the basis for the “ultimate Bitcoin influencer” through its BTC-centric outputs:
“I'd like to see it become the destination for the next 100 million or 500 million people that want to learn about Bitcoin, the point for their first steps of understanding.”
Spirit of Satoshi was built on the basis of an existing open-source model which possesses inherent proficiency in English and a “Wikipedia-type of bias”. The latter was addressed by structuring the model’s responses to its Bitcoin and Austrian economics principles data set.
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Keep it simple: Cryptonauts shares tips on growing a crypto YouTube channel
Cryptonauts co-founder Nathan Leung tells The Agenda how and why his team creates crypto content for the culture.
While the term “fake news” has been floating around for a while, the phrase was given new life and popularity when former United States President Donald Trump turned it into a viral campaign slogan. “Fake news” eventually became a generation-defining meme, and this is likely because there is a certain truth to the phrase that resonates with the public to this day.
Media does occasionally make mistakes in its reporting, and even Cointelegraph is not immune to this. At the same time, news anchors, journalists and media companies are also known to cast aside objectivity and inject their personal opinions — or those of their paid sponsors — into what is promoted as strictly fact-based news.
In 2023, this has become a crisis facing crypto content creators. The proverbial “jig” is up, and many investors are now well aware that much crypto-focused content has an ulterior motive of shilling a particular coin or, in some cases, an unannounced paid sponsor backing the content of the day. As a result of the broader fallout, several professional and hobbyist crypto content creators have told The Agenda that maintaining and growing their subscribers has been a challenge this year.
On Episode 22 of The Agenda, hosts Ray Salmond and Jonathan DeYoung spoke with Nathan Leung, co-founder and host of the Cryptonauts YouTube channel, about the nuts and bolts of educating and onboarding new users to crypto on YouTube — and how to remain ethical while doing so.
Humanizing is appetizing
Leung told The Agenda that when attempting to separate oneself from all the chaff, “humanizing” the content is a useful and effective tactic, given that “in times like this, everyone’s like, ‘NFTs are a scam, blah, blah, blah. Everything’s a scam.’” But as he points out, “There’s also good people trying to make digital ownership a real thing. There’s actually builders actually running hackathons, trying to find the best project, right? There’s actually real builders who want this technology to kind of help the world in a way.”
So, Cryptonauts talks to these builders and highlights that they are just regular people with a mission. “It’s kind of just humanizing. It’s like, yeah, you’re worth $250 million or $18 billion, right? But what do you do? Do you wake up in the morning? Do you have a family? Do you walk your dog?”
Related: The Agenda podcast predicts the future of crypto and talks adoption
Leung also emphasized the importance of respecting “the viewer’s time,” highlighting that the ultimate goal is to have viewers watch a whole video and not feel like their time was wasted.
“If they’re going to watch our video, we want them to at least watch it all, right? So, if we feel like it’s not absolutely necessary, we don’t want to waste their time either, because time is obviously the most valuable currency. So, we just try to make it short and sweet.”
He added, “I think a lot of people think that longer videos are better, but I think if you can just save people time and condense it and just make it engaging, it could be two minutes.”
Why Cryptonauts values organic growth over paid shilling
While many crypto content creators have been exposed for shilling their bags or accepting money under the table to promote other projects’ tokens, Leung says Cryptonauts doesn’t have this issue because they don’t depend on sponsored content for money.
“So, I think we had one rule: We said we would never do ICOs [initial coin offerings] very early on. We would only cover projects that were already listed and already launched, which turned out to be a good one. And we also kind of made it our fundamental rule not to push any exchanges — you saw what happened with FTX.”
Placing authenticity and enjoyment over monetization, Leung said, “We just do what we want, and we tell the stories we want. We just want to tell some good stories, make some good content and have fun while doing it. I think that’s the most important thing because money can’t buy passion.”
Despite admitting that “people don’t really care about crypto” right now when asked about Cryptonauts’ goals for the future, Leung said that the channel is “really trying to unite the crypto community.”
“I think we want to start doing something a little bit different. Just to kind of practice what we preach. If we are about community, we should start doing some real-life events.”
To hear more from Leung’s conversation with The Agenda — including Cryptonauts’ future vision for combining real-life experiences with crypto content and giving back to its community — listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!
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This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
ChatGPT web traffic drops for third consecutive month in August
Web traffic from users worldwide for OpenAI’s ChatGPT declined during the summer months, which could be linked to university-aged users out of school.
The popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT has seen a decrease in user traffic worldwide for the third consecutive month this August, according to data from analytics company Similarweb.
In August, desktop and mobile site traffic to OpenAI’s popular chatbot from visitors worldwide decreased by 3.2% to 1.43 billion. This follows a 10% drop in traffic two months prior. In addition, the amount of time spent on the site also dropped, though slightly, from 8.7 minutes to 7 minutes in August.
However, visits stemming from United States-based users began to increase in August by 0.4%. Unique visitors to the site, which slumped in June and July, rose by 3% in the U.S. and 0.3% worldwide in August.
Similarweb senior insights manager David F. Carr, who consistently tracks AI chatbots and authored the report, wrote that the fluctuation in users could be the result of students using the program having summer break and now resuming classes.
“Students seeking homework help appears to be part of the story: the percentage of younger users of the website dropped over the summer and is now starting to bounce back.”
This theory can be backed up by the drop in audience for the summer months of ChatGPT users in the 18–24 age range, both in the U.S. and worldwide.
Related: ChatGPT v4 aces the bar, SATs and can identify exploits in ETH contracts
According to the data, in the 18–24 age bracket in the U.S., traffic dropped 10% in May, around the time U.S. universities finish their semester, 15% in June, and another 4% in July. At its peak in April, 18–24-year-old visitors made up 30% of the total audience share in the United States.
A separate survey from May 2023 by Intelligent.com surveyed 1,223 undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S. and found that 30% answered that they had used ChatGPT for schoolwork during the academic year.
It reported that of those, 46% “frequently” use the tool for homework, and 1 in 8 said they saw an increase in GPA, which could be traced to their usage of the AI chatbot.
At the moment, there are no overarching rules regarding AI usage in universities within the United States. However, in Japan, the Ministry of Education has already spoken out on its plans to allow limited use of generative AI tools in elementary, junior high and high schools.
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