What Tim Tyler said. This wasn’t intended to explain Bitcoin itself (though it does cover some of that), but to close the part of the inferential distance that most people have to “walk” before they can begin to understand Bitcoin. Like I said in the post, simply understanding the cryptographic aspects is hard enough for most people, and it’s something they’ll need to understand first before they can understand how Bitcoin works and uses cryptography.
One must be careful not to overestimate what the layperson will immediately understand. On the Slate discussion of Bitcoin, for example, some commenters had trouble grasping the idea of sending money through their computer, saying things like, “what, do I put the coins in some slot”. It sounds like a stupid question, but it’s what a person is likely to say when they don’t understand how the scarcity arises and gets redistributed.
What Tim Tyler said. This wasn’t intended to explain Bitcoin itself (though it does cover some of that), but to close the part of the inferential distance that most people have to “walk” before they can begin to understand Bitcoin. Like I said in the post, simply understanding the cryptographic aspects is hard enough for most people, and it’s something they’ll need to understand first before they can understand how Bitcoin works and uses cryptography.
One must be careful not to overestimate what the layperson will immediately understand. On the Slate discussion of Bitcoin, for example, some commenters had trouble grasping the idea of sending money through their computer, saying things like, “what, do I put the coins in some slot”. It sounds like a stupid question, but it’s what a person is likely to say when they don’t understand how the scarcity arises and gets redistributed.