Cryptocurrency 101 in the South Bronx

Carlos Acevedo, a teacher at a public high school in the South Bronx, recently invited a group of his former students back for a two-day course in cryptocurrencies. He planned to cover decentralization, blockchain, peer-to-peer networks, and fiat currencies. Each student would then get five dollars, in a form of cryptomoney called Zcash, to spend. “After these two days, you’re going to be the one per cent,” he told the twenty-five young people who had gathered at the South Bronx Business Lab. “You’re going to know more about cryptocurrency and blockchain than ninety-nine per cent of people out there. You have the opportunity to get in on the industry right now.”

Until last month, Acevedo taught English at Morris Academy, in Morrisania, which is in the poorest congressional district in the country. Having read about Bitcoin, he started investing in cryptocurrency in 2014, and he’s been hooked ever since. He views it as a way of helping what he calls “the unbanked,”…