After speaking to random people about terms used in the “crypto/blockchain”world, people think that:
• Bitcoin exists physically and somehow it’s connected to the internet.
• Trustless means there's no trust.
• Mining means that there are miners digging up bitcoins with computers etc.
Clearly, these technological terms are not helping the public to trust the "trustless" technology.
Who wants to use something that cannot be trusted.
I decided to show them “0.00000001 BTC” and asked what this means?
• It’s a very small fraction of something, it’s much smaller than a cent and it’s probably useless.
• There are so many zeros after the comma, how is this money. Usually you see two decimal places.
• If I were to send money to my friend, do I need to mention all these zeros after the comma?
• I usually give away my coins, I don’t understand why I would need to keep one bitcoin. If I needed to pay for lunch, I guess I would need like a thousand of those coins.
Imagine when eBay or Amazon started operating and the first think you saw on their website is “internet is a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.” A lot of the websites that are using the blockchain technology pretty much sound like this and are leaving an end user confused.
As we interact with more people, we need to sell and repackage the story in a way that is “user friendly” and not try to prove how clued up you are (me included). We have newbies everywhere and our conversation has to be welcoming to the non-technical people.
I would love to hear your experiences
