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Looking Glass Education

12 min read

Looking Glass Education is a free, multilingual, Bitcoin-focused educational platform built by a six-person founding team: Seb Bunney (CEO), Daz Bea (COO), Greg Foss (Connection Builder), Max De Marco (Audio/Visual Artist), Jason Sansone (Content Writer), and James Lavish (Content Writer). Its flagship offering is the Bitcoin Foundation Course — a self-paced introduction to monetary history, debt and inflation, and Bitcoin as a financial-protection asset — supplemented by long-form Deep Dives essays, a books imprint (Bunney's The Hidden Cost of Money; B is for Bitcoin), and a guided self-custody product (CODL). The platform's editorial center of gravity is financial-literacy-and-protection, framing Bitcoin through a financial-industry-trained vantage point that combines Foss's credit-market lens, Lavish's macro-and-fiscal-dominance lens, Bunney's accessibility-and-curriculum focus, and Bea's operational direction. The platform is free-first, team-led, available in nine languages, and explicitly oriented to grassroots financial-education adoption — including a $40,000 partnership with the El Salvador-based Mi Primer Bitcoin initiative.

Why this source matters

Looking Glass Education is a financial-literacy-anchored Bitcoin educational platform. The Foundation Course’s framing — monetary history, fiat-system mechanics, debt and inflation as wealth-transfer mechanisms, Bitcoin as a financial-protection asset — reaches readers approaching Bitcoin from a financial-protection or retirement-planning concern rather than from technological curiosity or ideological conviction. The accessible-register pedagogical posture and the multilingual translation network extend the platform’s reach to non-English-speaking and non-specialist audiences that financial-industry-trained advocacy typically does not reach directly.

The platform is an artifact of the financial-industry-trained voice cluster within Bitcoin advocacy. The founding team combines roughly three decades of Greg Foss’s institutional fixed-income, distressed-debt, and credit-portfolio work; two decades of James Lavish’s institutional distressed-debt and macro-investment work; Seb Bunney’s accessibility-and-curriculum focus and his book-length monetary-debasement treatment in The Hidden Cost of Money; and Daz Bea’s operational direction. The combined voice — financial-industry-trained, accessibility-anchored, multi-disciplinary — gives the curriculum a financial-protection editorial center of gravity.

Its grassroots-partnership posture — most visibly the $40,000 donation to Mi Primer Bitcoin in El Salvador — signals an editorial commitment to financial-education access rather than to premium-credential-style monetization. The platform’s free-tier-first design is consequential: a substantial fraction of its potential audience is reached precisely because the foundational material has no paywall.

Bibliographic details

  • Title: Looking Glass Education
  • Founding team (six co-founders):
    • Seb Bunney — Chief Executive Officer
    • Daz Bea — Chief Operations Officer
    • Greg Foss — Connection Builder
    • Max De Marco — Audio/Visual Artist
    • Jason Sansone — Content Writer
    • James Lavish — Content Writer
  • Other regular collaborators: Jeff Booth (referenced thinker and adjacent collaborator); additional contributors across articles and video content
  • Launched: Active and publicly developed through the 2022–2026 period
  • Active status: Active; curriculum and content library expanding
  • Format: Web-based platform — self-paced video lessons (Foundation Course), long-form written essays (Deep Dives), a books imprint, and a guided self-custody product (CODL)
  • Pricing: Foundation Course free; books and CODL are paid offerings
  • Languages: Nine languages (English plus eight translations) at the Foundation-Course level; coverage varies for adjacent content
  • Bitcoin scope: Bitcoin-only — no altcoin material

About the organization

Looking Glass Education is a Bitcoin-focused educational organization built by a six-person founding team with the stated mission of providing accessible financial education. The team has emphasized in public-facing remarks an “equality of opportunity” framing — the idea that financial-literacy access should not be gated to those with prior wealth or insider knowledge. The organization operates an editorial team and translation network across its nine language offerings and has built grassroots partnerships in the broader Bitcoin-education ecosystem, most visibly with Mi Primer Bitcoin (the El Salvador-based community Bitcoin-education initiative).

The organization is team-led — six co-founders sharing CEO, COO, content-writing, AV-production, and outreach responsibilities. The structure produces a multi-disciplinary editorial voice with division of labor across content, operations, AV production, and outreach, and supports curatorial coherence within the team. Long-run durability depends on the founding team’s continued engagement.

Canonical platform

Format and recurring themes

The Bitcoin Foundation Course. The platform’s flagship offering — a free, self-paced video curriculum organized as a sequence of short lessons covering: the history of money, the mechanics of the modern fiat monetary system, debt-and-inflation dynamics, the failure modes of currency regimes through history, and Bitcoin’s properties as a response. The course is designed for non-specialist financial-literacy seekers; it does not assume prior cryptography, programming, or Austrian-economics background. Translation across nine languages is one of the course’s distinctive features.

Deep Dives essays. Long-form written content covering specific monetary and Bitcoin topics in greater depth than the Foundation Course. The essays are the platform’s reference-and-analysis layer; topics range across credit-market dynamics, sovereign-debt trajectories, fiscal-dominance mechanics, and specific Bitcoin-and-monetary-system interactions.

CODL self-custody product. A guided self-custody offering. Substantive engagement with self-custody as an operational discipline lives in the Bitcoin KB’s Practical self-custody and sovereignty cluster rather than at this source page; CODL is mentioned here as a Looking Glass offering and not treated as a primary educational pathway from this page.

Books imprint. Looking Glass operates a small books imprint adjacent to its educational platform. The two principal titles are Seb Bunney’s The Hidden Cost of Money (a book-length treatment of monetary debasement and its societal consequences) and B is for Bitcoin (an introductory work). The books are paid offerings distinct from the free Foundation Course material.

Curatorial voice. The platform’s framing aligns with a financial-protection and financial-industry-trained orientation to Bitcoin: monetary debasement as a wealth-transfer mechanism, fiscal-dominance as a contemporary risk vector, Bitcoin as the engineered response to fiat-system failure modes, and self-custody as the operational complement. The voice combines Foss’s credit-market analyst lens, Lavish’s macro-and-fiscal-dominance lens, and Bunney’s accessibility-and-curriculum focus into a unified pedagogical posture.

Translation-and-access sub-pattern. The nine-language coverage is a structural feature, not an afterthought. The platform’s grassroots-access editorial commitment shapes both content selection (foundational material first, advanced material later) and partnership posture (Mi Primer Bitcoin and adjacent community-education collaborations).

Founding team and collaborators

The six co-founders

  • Seb Bunney — Chief Executive Officer; Bitcoin educator; author of The Hidden Cost of Money; principal editorial voice on accessibility-and-curriculum direction.
  • Daz Bea — Chief Operations Officer; Australian Bitcoin educator with engineering background; operational direction across the platform.
  • Greg Foss — Connection Builder; long-tenure institutional credit-and-distressed-debt analyst; principal voice for the credit-market lens within the curriculum; author of Why Every Fixed-Income Investor Needs to Consider Bitcoin.
  • Max De Marco — Audio/Visual Artist; Bitcoin filmmaker and AV-content producer; principal voice for the video-and-cinematic dimension of the platform’s content.
  • Jason Sansone — Content Writer; contributing voice across written content.
  • James Lavish — Content Writer; institutional macro-and-credit analyst; host of The Bitcoin Layer podcast and Substack; contributing voice across written content and macro-framework integration.

Other named collaborators

  • Jeff Booth — frequent collaborator and referenced thinker; The Price of Tomorrow (see The Price of Tomorrow - Jeff Booth) supplies adjacent framework content that the Foundation Course’s deflation-and-technology-driven-abundance themes draw on.

Grassroots partnership

  • Mi Primer Bitcoin — the El Salvador-based grassroots Bitcoin-education initiative founded by John Dennehy; Looking Glass has donated $40,000 to the initiative and partners on adjacent content. Mi Primer Bitcoin is a candidate for a dedicated source page; pending the build, its relevance here is as a signal of Looking Glass’s accessibility-and-grassroots editorial commitment.

How to engage this platform

Where to start. For a reader approaching Bitcoin from a financial-protection, retirement-planning, or credit-market vantage point, the Bitcoin Foundation Course is the natural entry point. The Foundation Course’s framing is most effective when paired with Broken Money - Lyn Alden for the longer-monetary-history complement and with The Big Print - Lawrence Lepard for the late-cycle-debasement framework.

Specific-topic engagement. Looking Glass functions as a video-and-essay financial-literacy layer that pairs with the written canon:

Recommended sequence with companion sources. A reasonable financial-literacy-anchored pathway is: (1) work through the Looking Glass Bitcoin Foundation Course for the accessible video introduction, (2) read Broken Money - Lyn Alden for the systematic-history complement, (3) read The Big Print - Lawrence Lepard for the late-cycle-debasement framework, (4) move to The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous for the Austrian-tradition economic anchor, (5) engage Practical self-custody and sovereignty cluster notes before any operational self-custody decisions.

Influence and reception

Ecosystem position. Looking Glass Education is a Bitcoin-only, free-first, multilingual educational platform with a financial-literacy and financial-protection editorial center of gravity. The combination of free-first + Bitcoin-only + financial-literacy-anchored + nine-language coverage shapes its place in the contemporary Bitcoin-education landscape.

Audience reach. The platform reaches a financial-literacy-curious, financial-protection-concerned audience. The translation coverage extends reach into non-English-speaking markets, particularly in regions where currency-debasement concerns are immediate rather than theoretical.

Adoption signal. The platform is referenced across Bitcoin-aligned financial-literacy curators and is linked from broader Bitcoin onboarding directories. Its long-run trajectory depends on the founding team’s continued engagement and on the durability of its team-led organizational model.

Counter-arguments and tensions

Curriculum scope is focused, not comprehensive. Looking Glass’s flagship is a single Foundation Course supplemented by Deep Dives essays, a books imprint, and the CODL self-custody product. The right framing is “Foundation-Course-anchored, with essays for depth on selected topics” rather than “comprehensive curriculum across technical, business, protocol-development, and mining material.” Readers seeking depth on technical, protocol-development, or mining-economics topics should engage specialist resources for those specific dimensions.

Team-led durability is the principal organizational risk. The platform’s editorial coherence depends on the six-person founding team’s continued engagement. The risk is partially mitigated by the multi-disciplinary division of labor (no single point of failure across CEO, COO, content writing, AV production, and outreach) and by the broader translation network, but is not eliminated.

Editorial framing is overt, not neutral. Looking Glass teaches Bitcoin from a financial-protection-and-credit-market vantage point and does not aim for neutrality across cryptocurrency-tradition or mainstream-economics positions. For readers approaching from a sound-money or financial-literacy orientation, the overtness is a feature; a reader looking for “balanced” treatment that equally engages altcoin or Keynesian framings should know the platform is not built for that purpose.

The CODL product blurs the educational-platform framing. Looking Glass’s primary positioning is as an educational platform, but CODL is a guided self-custody product with operational and commercial dimensions. The intersection of educational mission and commercial-product offering is a small editorial tension that the platform itself acknowledges through disclosure but that readers should engage with awareness.

Specialist-depth limits are real. Topics that require deep technical, protocol-development, or mining-economics depth are not the Foundation Course’s focus. The platform’s curriculum is calibrated for financial-literacy-and-protection entry rather than specialist technical training.

Where to find this source

  • Looking Glass Education: lookingglasseducation.com — the canonical platform
  • Bitcoin Foundation Course: accessible through the platform’s main entry; free; nine-language coverage
  • Deep Dives essays: accessible through the platform’s content library
  • CODL self-custody product: documented and accessible through the platform; a paid offering distinct from the free educational material

Place in the broader Bitcoin canon

Open questions

  • How does the Foundation Course function alongside the canonical written works (The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous; Broken Money - Lyn Alden)? Is it most effective as a video-format reinforcement of the books, an accessible video-only on-ramp, or a distinct pedagogical register that stands on its own?
  • What is the long-run durability of the six-person founding-team organizational model? If one or more co-founders steps back from direct engagement, does the platform’s editorial voice persist?
  • Should the CODL self-custody product be engaged from the Practical self-custody and sovereignty cluster substantively, or is its educational-pathway value limited? Operational self-custody engagement should generally start from the dedicated KB cluster rather than from this source page.
  • How does Looking Glass’s translation network sustain quality across nine languages? Translation depth is a structural feature; quality-assurance protocols are not fully public.
  • How does the platform’s relationship with grassroots Bitcoin-education partnerships (most visibly Mi Primer Bitcoin) develop over time? The $40,000 donation is a strong opening signal; sustained collaboration patterns are still developing.

The founding team

  • Seb Bunney — CEO; principal editorial voice on accessibility-and-curriculum direction; author of The Hidden Cost of Money
  • Greg Foss — Connection Builder; principal voice for the credit-market lens
  • James Lavish — Content Writer; institutional macro-and-credit analyst voice
  • Daz Bea — COO; operational direction (no separate thinker page yet)
  • Max De Marco — AV producer; cinematic-content direction (no separate thinker page yet)
  • Jason Sansone — Content Writer (no separate thinker page yet)

Other collaborators

Other Bitcoin educational platforms in the KB

For scope, strengths, and audience-fit across the Bitcoin educational platforms, see Bitcoin educational platforms - Comparison.

Concepts the platform teaches

Companion canonical sources

Adjacent thinkers

Sub-MOC

Graph View

Backlinks