By
Temitope Olatunji
April 24th, 2024
Bitcoin professionals revealed their thoughts on how easily explain the digital currency to their mothers.
The use of bitcoin is steadily growing today, with more merchants embracing the technology. Still, it is difficult sometimes for people, even for those with technological knowledge, to understand the cryptocurrency. In order to accelerate the adoption of bitcoin, it is necessary to make it more comprehensible for average user.
Zapchain, a website for bitcoin professionals, approached this problem. Trying to provide a simple description of bitcoin, Boost CEO and founder, Matt Schlicht, posted a question on the site: “What is Bitcoin? How would you explain it to your mom?”
A lot of bitcoin usersand professionals in the industry responded to the question, sharing ideas of how to make their mothers understand the cryptocurrency.
William Burton, a founder of bitcoin wallet Casheer, said: “Bitcoin is a secure digital form of money; that lets you store value without a bank or 3rd party. You can send payments anywhere in the world, for a fraction of the cost and time associated with traditional payment methods.”
SecuraCoin co-founder Ageesen Sri, wrote: “It’s money, like the money you have on your debit card, except now you don’t need a card (if you don’t want to).”
Bitcoin professional Aaron Williams said: “Bitcoin is like a giant excel spreadsheet with all the bitcoin balances. It is maintained by independent computers across the internet who each have a copy. The computers keep their copy in sync thanks to the brilliant design of Bitcoin. Bitcoins can be thought of as a borderless currency that can be sent from individual to individual through the internet, bypassing the banking network. No, not like Paypal, they user the banking system. More like email. Think of bitcoin wallets like email accounts. Units of value can be sent from New York to Paris instantly from one Bitcoin wallet to another.”
“It’s magical internet money Mum,” said David Dvorak, CTO of Wow Such Business.
CTO at PokerNearMe and startup founder Dan McArdle, answered: “Bitcoin is digital cash. It is secure, easy to send and receive, and doesn’t require having an “account” with anyone in order to use. Bitcoin sits in your digital wallet, just like physical cash sits in your leather wallet. You are free to fully control it, and it can’t be taken from you unless you do something silly like leave your wallet out in the open or choose to let someone else hold it for you. Most money is digital now anyway (think bank account balances). But we’ve hacked traditional money in order to make it work electronically, which is why it takes so long and costs so much to wire money between banks or accept credit cards as a merchant. Bitcoin was built from the ground up as native money for the internet. It is, therefore, global, secure, and just about free and instant to use.”
Jef Cavens, designer at Swarm, said: “Although I tried to come up with different (sneaky) ways to explain it to the layman, bitcoin just shouldn’t be explained to people who are not interested in technology as such. The same way it makes no sense to explain TCP/IP to your mom. Explaining e-mail, Chrome, Wikipedia and Facebook however makes a lot of sense.”