Today’s cringe-worthy coffee shop conversation goes to the guy who was desperately trying to impress his girlfriend with his Bitcoin prowess, and failing miserably.
I swear I could hear his girlfriend pleading with heavenly forces to send lightning, an earthquake, hurricane, maybe open a sinkhole—anything to stop the pain as he blathered on about nonsense for at least 10-15 minutes.
Sadly, I’ve been there myself trying to explain Bitcoin without proper preparation and I also failed pretty miserably.
So today I’m going to fix that for you and share the secret.
I’m going to defy every technical explainer out there and give you the simple explanation of what Bitcoin is, without getting into details of how it works.
Just memorize these two sentences and you’ll be the hit of every party as you show up those wannabes rambling on about hashing and blockchains while completely missing the point.
Ready?
Here we go!
Bitcoin is a currency where a majority vote (not a government or bank) decides how much money exists and who owns it.
Anyone can vote with their computing power, and the result is trustworthy because in theory, no rogue voter will have enough computing power to out-vote the rest of the voters to their own advantage.
The end.
(Oh, and for bonus points, you can open a discussion about how some of the largest Bitcoin mining pools (groups of voters) may be invalidating the core premise of Bitcoin by in fact out-voting the entire rest of the world. That’s sure to be a good time!)
-David
