GiveBitcoin founder Cory Klippsten struggled to warm his parents up to Bitcoin. For two years, he coaxed and educated, until his evangelism finally paid off in the spring of 2019.
“After 100s of hours, books, podcasts, articles, I finally got my parents to buy some bitcoin,” he told Bitcoin Magazine.
That was five years after Klippsten received his own first bitcoin from a benevolent stranger at a tech conference. He lost the keys and didn’t take a dive down the rabbit hole. That plunge wouldn't come until the beginning of 2017, when Klippsten bought into bitcoin — both in the literal and in the ideological sense.
“After getting super into bitcoin, I tried to become as skilled as possible to be a pitchman for bitcoin and being an evangelist, thinking that there was some magical way to talk about bitcoin and red-pill somebody in a twenty-minute conversation — kinda like a startup pitch.”
Incidentally, his Twitter username is ₿itcoin Morpheus, an homage to the captain of the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix who “red pills” Neo on the reality that his world is a computer simulation.
Unlike Morpheus, though, who enlightens Neo to the cypher-dystopia represented in the film in a matter of minutes, Klippsten finds that bitcoin is “just not something that can be grasped in one conversation.”
That’s why he started GiveBitcoin.
GiveBitcoin: Education and Money, Wrapped in One
GiveBitcoin[1] is a service that allows Bitcoiners to send bitcoin to their friends, loved ones and anyone in between. You can give as little as $5 or as much as $4,900, and the gift comes with a minimum time lock of one year and a maximum lock of five years. That way, they can’t immediately liquidate it without waiting — and learning,
