As a high school teacher, I am constantly thinking of ways to teach my own children about all of the things I know they aren't going to learn in school.  As an educator, I am very fond of using students' phones as a way of teaching a lesson or skill; Gen Z and Alpha are particularly receptive to this.  I found a gem of an app that allowed be to teach my young ones about the subjects mentioned in the title.  The youngest one even cost me an extra 5 dollars that I wasn't planning on spending (he is very good at that).  Before I begin, I must give a disclaimer:

I AM NOT suggesting spending money on this app for any other reason than purely educational purposes.  The reason I decided to pay the money is because the app has a very simple interface so that my small children can understand a concept by visualizing it over the course of a few days.  The app does work as advertised, but it has not been out long, and I will count myself very lucky if I even make my money back.

The app is called Bitcoin Mining; a simple search in the Google or Apple Store will bring it right to the top.  It looks like this:

It advertises itself as a bitcoin cloud mining app where you buy computing power and are rewarded with the bitcoin your portion of the computing power invests in.  This may be true, or it may be one of those pennies on the dollar deals.  But again, I am not recommending this as an investment; I'm recommending it for the lesson I used to teach my kids, which is as follows.

Download the app onto their phone, and buy the new user package for 5$  The reason you want to do this is because the app has a feature where you can earn computing power for free by watching up to 30 videos a day.  This takes a long time and a small child is not going to do that.  Besides, I want to teach them about passive income, not how to work for money (which is what watching the videos do).  Buying the 5$ package will allow the mining app to continuously run without them having to do anything.  

Let them watch the numbers start moving and then teach them about satoshis.  Have them count the zeroes back from the decimal level to 8 and make them understand that when they get to 8 that is where the real satoshis start.  The app makes many more decimal places I think just for visual effect.  By the way, Its easiest to explain the value of satoshis using a Bitcoin price of 100k.  Its much easier for them to approximate that 10 sats = a penny; 100 sats =  10 cents; and that 1000 sats equals a dollar.  

Once they grasp this show them the referral page where their invite code is displayed.  Then explain to them how if they can "sell" the app to someone else, they get a portion of the rewards from the other person.  Let them talk you into downloading it onto your phone and use their invite code.  Now send them away for a few hours, and do a full round of the free videos so that your miner starts working, and they are able to see the portion of their rewards for "referring you."  Also, if you do this with the other parent as well, they can better see the compounding effect of the referrals. My three boys fought over whose code their mom used!  The little one won ... imagine that ...  

In about 5 days when they have around 100 sats help them withdraw it to a Coinbase account or into their own ZBD wallet that you create for them.  I have written more about the ZBD Wallet in my previous article.  This will let them see that the satoshi's are actually worth real money.  Now is when you can go through the calculations with them about the price of bitcoin going up and down; the fact that they are earning about 2 cents a day; when BTC is around 100,000$; and the fact that at that price it will take 250 days to make the 5 dollars back, but after 250 days, they will be making profit from an initial investment.

My biggest advice:  Treat this as a game in order to teach a lesson.  Talk to your kids about the number of sats they have and about how many of their friends they can make a "sale" to.  Talk to them about how they did not have to do anything in order to accumulate the sats; that it is only time that makes the number of sats they have go up.  If in around 250 days, the app stays true to its purpose and develops a good reputation, and you can actually demonstrate to them that they have regained the money that you originally gave them, then it might be the time to change the conversation to a more serious lesson about investing and letting them put some of their own money in if they want. 

But for now, the app is very new, and there is serious risk of a rug pull for people who dump lots of money into it.

Funny ending to the story.  I did the free thirty videos for about three days to let them see that number on their invitation screen go continuously up, after that I stopped.  Without paying or continuously logging in to claim the free bonus or watching the videos the miner will completely stop.  My youngest whom I used the referral code for, noticed that his invitation rewards had stopped going up.  I explained to him its because our miner was free and that they had stopped because I didn't want to pay for it on mine. His mother's miner had also stopped because I had to do them on her phone.   (watching all those videos suuuuuccks).  So my youngest (the one with the heightened survival instincts) winds up talking his mom into dropping another 5 bucks on her app so that his invitation rewards would keep going up ...

So be careful if you have children with silver tongues and a sucker for a mom.  It might cost you more than 5$ ...