Cryptocurrencies are ruining the financial education of a generation of teena...

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It's not easy being a teenager today. Today's teens have experienced coronavirus restrictions, including lockdowns and the first experiment in mass online secondary education. But they've also seen the rise of cryptocurrencies, and that can have a strong impact on their financial education.

Because? Possibly because today's teenagers have been hearing for months, even years, about assets that never seem to stop rising and that make anyone rich. This is obviously attractive, especially to those who come from a more disadvantaged background.


Cryptocurrencies worry teachers
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Recently, the satirical website El Mundo Today said that cryptoeconomics is so complex that only teenagers and some podcasters can understand it. According to some studies, % of cryptocurrency transactions are made by millennials , with generation X being the second most interested group. But it is true that today's teenagers cannot be called millennials, but that qualification is used more for those born in the s and s. In the US, according to a study by the Wells Fargo bank, % of teenagers They think they know more about cryptocurrencies than their parents, and it seems that there are parents who think the same. The Southern China Morning Post of Hong Kong tells how a teenager from this city began investing at the age of twelve.

Lucy Kellaway has been editor of the prestigious Lex column in the Financial Times and has become a secondary school teacher at a high school in a poor area of ​​London. She recounts how teenagers from her high school, many of whom even have school scholarships, invest (or play) with cryptocurrencies. The rise in Bitcoin prices makes them believe that it will continue in a head that has not ex  Romania Email List  perienced any more crisis than that of the covid and they inform themselves through advice from celebrities on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.



How do they buy them? Partly online, partly by exchanging them for gift cards from Amazon and partly through ATMs. The BitBase company already has of these ATMs in Spain that, apart from buying cryptocurrencies, allow you to withdraw money, and it plans its assault on the European market soon. But they also even manage to convince their parents to invest in crypto assets, their parents usually do not know much about finances and in a few months these teenagers have managed to learn about risk management, diversification and volatility, which is still impressive.

However, for Lucy, these students are not able to apply other knowledge they have received at school, such as compound interest, to their real lives. If they handle it in math class, they also have to learn that if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn't.

While it seems that companies seem interested in doing business with teenagers, the Seattle startup Stack is going to launch a platform aimed at teenagers that through game mechanisms (gamification) will allow teenagers to invest in different cryptocurrencies. While they are minors, their parents will be co-owners of the accounts. They also do not rule out that young professional university students will use it, but their target is teenagers.

In Spain it does not seem so widespread
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According to the Spanish neobank Rebellion Pay, % of Spaniards between and are considering buying cryptocurrencies in recent months. Is it possible that teenagers are even more into cryptocurrencies? Is a little wolf of Wall Street hiding behind that face that we seem to resent for existing? It is unlikely.

I have been asking my friends who teach high school classes in rural and urban areas, in public and charter schools, in a non-scientific study, and the answer they have given me is that in general it is not something widespread.

I have also asked some teenagers between twelve and seventeen years old who live in the PAU of Carabanchel and although they had all heard about cryptocurrencies and for them it is “digital money”, it is not even a topic of conversation (although it is mentioned more as as age increases) nor is having cryptocurrencies something common for them (although they do have someone they know who has or has had cryptocurrencies).