Reyna Chicas – The Invisible Battle: Who Controls the Narrative of Bitcoin Education? | BTC Prague

At the BTC Prague stage, I asked the audience a simple question: when you picture a Bitcoin educator, who do you see? That question cuts to the heart of something I’ve been wrestling with — an invisible battle over who gets to write the story of Bitcoin education, and whether that story still belongs to the people it’s meant to serve.

How I Got Here

I’m Reyna, director of education at My First Bitcoin, a nonprofit that started in El Salvador and now reaches educators and communities in over 35 countries. But I didn’t start as a director. In 2023, I was invited to teach in Panajachel, Guatemala — not because I was a professional teacher, but because I had gone through the program and they trusted me. The community specifically wanted a female educator, and once I arrived, I understood why. In this predominantly Mayan community, women ran many of the businesses already accepting Bitcoin — but conversations about money were still led by men. Being a woman genuinely helped me open those doors.

I assumed that because businesses were already accepting Bitcoin, teaching would be easy. I was wrong. Adoption doesn’t equal curiosity. Most people were simply taking payments and instantly converting to fiat. My first classes were basically no-shows. So we knocked on doors, taught teachers first, and slowly built trust — not on tech, but on human connection. That experience lit something in me. I came back to El Salvador on fire.

When Education Becomes a PR Strategy

As My First Bitcoin grew, something started to feel off. Governments invited us to collaborate, then built their own closed curriculums using ideas we had shared openly. Companies promised partnership, then launched polished programs with no public contribution allowed. Students became metrics. Photo ops. Headline fodder. Bitcoin was still in the picture, but the message was being lost.

I realized that when Bitcoin education stops being about understanding and starts being about ownership, we’ve already lost the plot. This is the invisible battle — not about access, but about control of the narrative. Who decides what gets taught? What parts of Bitcoin get spotlighted, and what gets quietly left out? Bitcoin is neutral. Bitcoin education never is.

The Quiet Capture

I come from El Salvador, once celebrated as the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. That story changed. As part of a $1.4 billion IMF deal, Bitcoin is no longer legal tender there as of April 30th this year. The Bitcoin law arrived with big announcements. The reversal came quietly. When we questioned it, we were told to trust and wait.

This pattern repeats globally. In Venezuela, people used Bitcoin to survive inflation while the government pushed its own coin. In Brazil, many Bitcoin education programs are tied to fintech and government agendas. In China, the government controls both the money and the curriculum — that’s not education, that’s compliance. And it doesn’t always look like censorship. Sometimes it looks like a sponsorship, a curriculum with no authors, or applause for a story we didn’t get to write.

What Real Bitcoin Education Looks Like

At My First Bitcoin, we remove names from our curriculum — not to hide, but to invite. No one owns Bitcoin, so no one owns Bitcoin education either. There’s a critical difference between a curriculum with no authors and one with no accountability. Ours aims to say: this belongs to all of us.

I’ve seen what open education can do. A teacher in El Salvador completed our Bitcoin diploma and went back to teach his own former teachers. Volunteers translated the curriculum into Swahili, Portuguese, and French — not because we asked, but because they saw the value. Felix, founder of a program in Kenya, launched his first cohort in October 2023. By June 2025, he’d run six more cohorts with 138 recent graduates — and ten new Bitcoin education programs had been born from his work, in India, Haiti, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. No marketing, no mandates — just people who learned, believed, and chose to build.

Staying Free