Dear Cryptocurrency Community,
I write you on behalf of all the people you want to join the Hive Community, and I ask that you speak in normal language about cryptocurrency. Years ago I joined the Chain which shall not be named, which begins with an S and ends in a T. And on that chain I got my first taste of the Tyranny of Terminology, which was now many years ago, in a place far, far away. But unfortunately this Tyranny still exists today.
As a former Newbie, who is still a student of this new technological and financial niche, I continue to be exposed to new terms, new phrases and things which need to defined, and used in context to be understood. So I beseech those of you, who write about new things, to keep in mind who your audience is, now and in the future. While I understand the tendency to teach as if speaking to the choir... the choir doesn't need to be brought to Jesus, they are already in the church. The people you are seeking to bring to Jesus are outside the church, and those people need to hear words, and sentences they can understand. No one can worship a God they don't know and understand, and the same goes for new techonology and innovations. There are many people who are Bitcurious but when they ask about Bitcoin, the people who explain it to them speaker in a language, which might as well be ancient Sanskrit, because it is unintelligible to a normal, non-cryptocurrency lingo fluent person.
For example, you measure time in terms of blocktime, you measure productivity in terms of blockspace, you measure speed in TPS (transactions per second) and speak in terms of web 1.0, web 2.0, and web 3.0 as a historical timelime with no contextual references. Then to add to new peoples complete bewilderment you speak of solutions in terms of first layer, second layer and zero layer, and throw in terms like sidechain, parallel chain forked chain, for extra confusion. Then just when a newcomer thinks they can't get more confused you speak of decentralized, distributed networks running nodes, along with determining consensus using proof of work, proof of stake, and proof of authority.
This terminology word salad creates a great product, which I called Proof of Confusion. and then a light bulb goes off in someone's head; they realize that this is overwhelmingly confusing, and they create a glossary. Wonderful, but it's a glossary where every cryptocurrency word is explained with other cryptocurrency words. This completes the circle of confusion. Then they stand back and say : "See" , as if they have cleaned the window of dirt and now you can see and understand.
But instead of transparency, the window is opaque, and the knowledge not distributed, but centralizedd in an seemingly inpenetrable wall of jargon and unfamiliar, undefined words.
So I ask, that you remember, that cryptocurrency is complicated, and the terminology is unlike any other branch of finance or technology. It literally is a new part or a new field called financial technology, which is a place few have ever gone before. So while many of us are seasoned explorers, most who follow are unseasoned and untrained settlers. Please help them survive and not be killed by the harsh and dangerous environment of cryptocurrency. Because if we let all our settlers die, there is no way for our community to grow. And cryptocurrency will always be thought of as an unfriendly, dangerous new frontier, where many people go, but few return, and many are rumored to have died.
