Jack Paul 
The Challenge of Explaining Crypto to Beginners
We’ve all been there, I think. Sitting at a holiday dinner, someone asks you to explain cryptocurrency. They haven’t even heard of Ethereum. You start talking about proof-of-stake, smart contracts, DeFi, and before you know it, their eyes glaze over. You’ve made things worse, not better.
It’s a common problem, really. The people who think about crypto every day often struggle to explain it to those who don’t. There’s this gap between technical understanding and simple communication. Maybe the best teachers aren’t the experts, but those who are just one step ahead.
Ben Thompson’s Tech-Focused Perspective
Ben Thompson, who writes about tech strategy, mentions crypto maybe twice a year in his newsletter. Yet he explains it better than most daily crypto thinkers. He starts with the basics: blockchains let disparate groups reach consensus without centralized authority.
What’s interesting is where Thompson focuses. He sees crypto’s real value in stablecoins, not speculative tokens. Stablecoins combine digital advantages—easy duplication, universal access—with something digital goods usually lack: scarcity. They’re like internet-native currency.
Thompson makes a practical case too. For fintech companies, building on blockchain means you don’t need to create financial backends from scratch. The blockchain handles money holding, account reconciliation, transaction ledgers. Most importantly, it establishes trust. “You get all that for free with blockchains,” he says.
This perspective feels particularly relevant now. While token prices fluctuate, traditional finance firms like Stripe and Visa are exploring blockchain integration. They’re not chasing speculation; they want efficiency.
The Classic Apple Analogy
There’s a Medium post from 2013 that still offers one of the clearest Bitcoin explanations. It uses a simple park bench scenario with apples. The author imagines digital apples that behave like physical ones.
Here’s how it works: everyone’s computer maintains a shared ledger of all digital apple transactions. Sending a digital apple becomes as tangible as handing over a real one. No bank (or “Uncle Tommy”) needed to validate the exchange.
The post explains proof-of-work simply too. You could help update the ledger and earn digital apples as reward. That’s the only way new apples enter the system, creating scarcity.
“That system I explained exists,” the author concludes. “It’s called the Bitcoin protocol. And those digital apples are the ‘bitcoins’ within the system.”
The beauty of this explanation extends beyond currency. Since it’s digital, you can attach other things—notes, contracts, stock certificates, ID cards. We’re only now, twelve years later, starting to put those things on blockchains.
Adopting a Beginner’s Mindset
There’s a Zen concept called shoshin—beginner’s mind. It means approaching learning with openness and lack of preconceptions. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” a Zen master wrote. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”
This might be the best approach for understanding crypto. When experts get too deep into technical details, they lose sight of fundamental questions. Sometimes you need to channel Tom Hanks in “Big,” who kept saying “I don’t get it” until things made simple sense.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson. Don’t try to explain everything at once. Start with stablecoins as internet currency. Or use the apple analogy. Focus on what matters to your audience—whether it’s a real estate professional seeing efficiency gains or a relative curious about digital money.
The explanations exist. We just need to remember how to be beginners again, even when we think we know the answers.