So a couple of months ago I posted about printing off paper wallets and giving them to students who asked a good question, or worked out a problem etc. After some generous donations (shout out to /u/comp21!) here are the results of my experiment:

First handout: I printed out 2 copies of a paper wallet, loaded it with $5 and gave it to a kid who I was pretty sure would redeem it and be interested after he worked out a problem. I told him he had 24 hours to sweep it, wrote him a little note about using breadwallet, and we were finished. He came back from lunch and was excited to say he had $5 in bitcoin.

...then the class had a meltdown. I had to put out a lot of fires. Most of the kids kept saying some combination of dark / web / net and how it was used to buy drugs and it's all anonymous so you can't be tracked. This basically turned into a 25 minute discuss about internet security.

Next few handouts: Similar process, but the kids didn't freak out as much. My next 3 were redeemed almost immediately and I started talking about using something like gyft to buy cards to spend the money wherever they wanted. This is when kids began to kinda lose interest. I was hoping the initial $20 into the class would get spread out between students but that didn't happen. I tried to promote these transactions, and maybe had a few $1 transactions, but only one was between students who hadn't received money.

Losing interest: As I continued passing out to more students, the redemption level dropped. The value of some of the kids wallets had dropped, so there were rumors of "bitcoin is going bankrupt." This did bring up some good conversation, and I was able to help with some misconceptions, but most of the kids were losing interest.

As I passed out more wallets my redemption level began to drop. I think I passed out a total of 30 wallets loaded with $5, but ended up pulling back about $85 from unredeemed wallets (so there is $65 in the wild as a result of my efforts).

This was purely an experiment, and was very shocking for a lot of students the first couple times but I think that by the end I couldn't get most students on board because they couldn't walk into subway and buy something with it. Most of the kids were very curious and open to the idea, but still think of it as "magic internet money you can't use"

I'll try to respond with questions people have. Thanks for the help and donations!