Today, in the personal finance class I teach, I was talking about currency values and exchange rates. After passing around some foreign currency I had (Canadian dollars, British pounds, Brazilian real), I introduced students to the idea of a digital currency that was not tied to any one country – bit coin!

Some of my students had heard about it and had a vague idea about what it is, but many had not. I showed them a short video to explain the concept of the decentralized currency, and how super computers can be used to “mine” the bit coins. I was reminded of teaching this topic last semester, and a comparison one of my students had made in an effort to understand that I (as well as the class) found quite funny.

“So…. it’s kind of like Pokemon Go, the whole mining thing.” This happened in the fall of 2016, right after the summer that Pokemon Go had come out and had become so popular. I cracked a smile but managed to suppress a laugh, not wanting the student to think I was laughing at him. “Yeah, sort of..” I managed to respond, never having played the game myself. I knew the gist of it since my sister played it, so I knew you had to find and capture pokemon, which could be an extreme simplification of bit coin miners competing to seal off a block of transactions to get rewarded with bit coins…. Did I lose you there? I didn’t go into that much detail with them because it’s really beyond the scope of a personal finance class. And to be honest, I don’t grasp the concept 100% either, but I wanted my students to at least be aware of the existence and basic idea of a digital currency. I told them that if they were interested in learning more about the topic, there are plenty of videos, articles, and websites out there that are very helpful.