I realized this last week at a bodega. Jake wanted a Gatorade. I told him to go pay. He walked up to the counter, tapped my phone on the reader, and walked back. He's 10 and he has never once counted out bills and coins to buy something.

That's not an exaggeration. Between Apple Pay, my wife Sarah's Venmo, and school lunch accounts that auto-reload from a credit card, my kids have grown up in a world where money is completely invisible. It's a number on a screen that goes down when you tap.

I didn't realize how much that matters until I tried to explain saving. "If you don't spend it, it grows." Jake looked at me like I was speaking another language. Why would a number on a screen grow? Where does the extra come from? Who decides?

These are actually brilliant questions. And the honest answers are uncomfortable. Banks pay you interest from lending your money to other people. The government prints more dollars when it needs them. The number goes up but what it buys goes down. Try explaining that to a kid who's never held a physical quarter.

His older sister Mia overheard us talking and said "so the bank just uses our money and gives us like nothing back?" She's 13. She figured out fractional reserve banking in one sentence without knowing what it's called.

I started sending Jake sats over Lightning. Small amounts. 100 here, 200 there, for chores or good grades. The difference was immediate. He could see the number. He could send it to Mia. He could see it didn't change overnight because nobody was adding to the pile. When I sent him 500 sats for cleaning out the garage, he watched the payment confirm in two seconds and said "that was real."

He was right. It was more real than a credit card tap has ever felt to him.

Now Mia wants in. She asked if she could earn sats for babysitting Jake instead of getting paid in dollars. I said yes. Last Saturday she watched him for three hours and I sent her 2,000 sats. She checked the dollar value, frowned, and said "that's only like a dollar fifty." I told her to check again in a year.

She's checking the price every morning now. Not because I told her to. Because she owns something and she wants to know what it's worth. That instinct — to watch, to care, to pay attention to what you have — that's what tap-to-pay killed. Everything was someone else's problem until it was hers.

I'm not trying to raise Bitcoin maximalists. I'm trying to raise kids who understand that money has to come from somewhere. That saving means something. That a dollar in your pocket today isn't the same as a dollar in your pocket next year, even though it has the same number printed on it.

Cash used to teach kids that. They'd save coins in a jar and watch the pile grow. My kids don't have jars. They have tap-to-pay. Sats are the closest thing they've got to something they can hold, count, and actually own.