What level of detail is appropriate? Is she a stock broker or a finance person? Does she need to be convinced of its security model?
To make it very simple, like for a 5 year old: "Bitcoin is like digital gold and if you have it, you protect it like you would protect jewelery or something you keep in a safe deposit box. Its better than bank money because you can protect it with only a secret, and like cash, no bank can stop you from sending it to someone. You can send it over the internet because its digital, but its even more scarce than gold, and its value is closely tied to the electricity it takes to produce it. Its the first, and eventually probably the only thing in cyberspace that is actually scarce. Its far more scarce than gold, but its also far more divisible than gold. As long as it continues to be adopted in place of inflatable money its average value can only ever go up over time."
That would be word salad for her. I’m still trying to get her to understand that bitcoin isn’t a tech company. She wanted a video so she could try to digest an explanation slowly. I sent her the animated explanation above. We’ll see how that lands. I don’t anticipate her ever using bitcoin. Though she could surprise me.
Is this word salad?
Bitcoin is a type of digital money that exists only on the internet. Unlike regular money (like dollars or euros), it's not controlled by any government or bank. Instead, it runs on a system where lots of people help keep track of all the transactions using a special kind of technology called "blockchain."
Imagine it like a digital ledger or a notebook that everyone can see, but no one can change unfairly. When you send or receive Bitcoin, your transaction is recorded in this notebook. The system uses computers to solve complex puzzles to make sure the transactions are secure and to "mine" new Bitcoins. This is how new Bitcoins are created and how people are rewarded for helping run the system.
In short: Bitcoin is online money that people trust because it's decentralized (not controlled by one person) and very hard to cheat.
It is not to me. But I’ve learned my mom loses the plot at some point in the short explainer. And she has requested a visual aid cause she’s not following.
Is she trying to understand its technical aspects?
I think we’re still at the what is a bitcoin stage. Still not sure my mom understands all of the things you can do on a computer. She still thinks facebook is all social media and if someone is on a computer they must be on facebook. So having a kid who is like “yeah Mom I went to Latvia for Nostr and Bitcoin conferences.” She’s just trying to understand it enough to explain to her friends what her kid is doing.
Oddbean new post about login | logout