tl;dr: An afternoon with my nephews opens my eyes to future possibilities.

I spent a few hours the other day with two of my nephews, ages 11 and 13.

During that time, qw set up a Helium network node and I educated them, in so many words, about community-owned, crypto-based, decentralized networks.

What blew me away was how quickly they grabbed onto the idea, understanding both the technology (at a high level) and then the business model.

What would take adults a long time to grok was almost obvious to these kids.

They understood the power of leveraging unused assets (e.g. bandwidth) and getting compensated for it, quickly understood what a mesh network was, started researching the different types of hardware required to make the network work, enjoyed looking at the global map of over 50k hotspots, and exploring addresses on the blockchain.

I sent one of them some HNT so they could experience a transaction and, by the end of our time together, one of them had changed their default search engine to Presearch and the other one was trying to figure out how to turn his Raspberry Pi into a Mysterium network node.

I told them that, when it comes to technology, especially as an early adopter, patience is the key.

It will take a while to figure things out, but once you do, it will make sense. That’s why, as I wrote 3 years ago, it makes sense to play with crypto today to save time in the future.

As I get older, I am reminded of the energy of my youth and that, through them, you can spot the next big trend as well as look at the world through their eyes, which gives you a glimpse of the future.

After we finished our crypto lesson, they schooled me a bit.

One of them has an Oculus and, though I don’t like the idea of Facebook, er Meta, controlling what goes into my brain, I gave it a try.

It had been a few years since I had put on a VR headset and I was blown away by the advances in the tech and the experience.

For them, all of this is natural and “part of their world.”

Now, crypto is as well.

A lot of times, we “network” but typically it’s with people in our age group (or older as we look for mentors).

What I am seeing now is how valuable it is to “network” with people much younger.

I just need to put it into practice.