Learning from someone just one step ahead
I was at a holiday dinner recently and someone asked me to explain cryptocurrency. They were completely new to the topic—hadn’t even heard of Ethereum before. I tried my best, but honestly, I did a pretty terrible job. I started talking about proof-of-stake, then smart contracts, then DeFi, then DePIN, and then circled back to what a blockchain even is. By the end, I’m pretty sure I left them more confused than when we started.
It made me realize something important. The best person to learn from isn’t necessarily the expert who thinks about something every day. Sometimes it’s the person who’s just one step ahead of you, or someone who only engages with the topic occasionally. They haven’t gotten lost in all the technical details yet.
Ben Thompson’s clear explanation
Take Ben Thompson, for example. He’s a tech writer who mentions crypto in his newsletter maybe twice a year. But he explains why it matters better than most crypto experts I know. He starts with the basics: “Blockchains are the idea that disparate groups can come to a consensus without any kind of centralized authority.”
That decentralization gives crypto what Thompson calls “all the qualities” of digital goods—endlessly duplicable, universally accessible, easily distributed—but with one crucial difference: “it has scarcity.” He finds this interesting because, as a writer of digital newsletters, he faces the problem that “digital goods are fundamentally hard to monetize because they are infinitely duplicable.”
In practice though, Thompson thinks crypto is mostly interesting as a way to send money peer-to-peer. That’s why his case for crypto focuses mostly on stablecoins. He says stablecoins represent “all internet sort of things” he finds interesting—a universal ledger, scarcity, fast transactions—without the “downside” things like “the pure speculation on a coin going up, the wild swings in value.”
What you end up with, he says, is “basically this currency that operates like the internet.” That’s the definition I wish I had at dinner: Crypto is a currency that acts like the internet.
Why businesses find it useful
Thompson also explains why this matters for businesses. “If you want to set up some kind of financial entity, you don’t have to build out the backend to track everyone’s finances…you can just build it directly on top of the blockchain.” This lets companies “offload” the difficult parts of finance to a blockchain: holding money, reconciling accounts, keeping a ledger of transactions, and establishing trust. “You get all that for free with blockchains.”
My neighbor at dinner—he works in real estate—would have understood that appeal immediately. Thompson’s explanation from 2024 feels even more relevant now at the end of 2025. Token prices might be down, but traditional finance companies like Stripe, BlackRock, and Visa are getting more interested in moving parts of their business to blockchains.
The apple analogy that works
There’s also a Medium post from 2013 that offers what might be the most accessible Bitcoin explanation I’ve seen. The author starts with a simple apple exchange on a park bench to show how blockchains make digital apples behave like physical ones.
These blockchains, he says, “live in everybody’s computers [where] all the transactions that have ever happened, from all time, in digital apples will be recorded in it.” As a result, sending one of those apples is “as good as seeing a physical apple leave my hand and drop into your pocket.”
It’s also as permissionless as exchanging real apples: “Just like on the park bench, the exchange involved two people only. You and me—we didn’t need Uncle Tommy there to make it valid.” Uncle Tommy, of course, stands in for banks.
This setup leads to a good explanation of proof-of-work: “You could participate in this network too and update the ledger and make sure it all checks out. For the trouble, you could get like 25 digital apples as a reward.” It explains scarcity too: “In fact, that’s the only way to create more digital apples in the system.”
With all that established, Bitcoin becomes much clearer: “That system I explained exists. It’s called the Bitcoin protocol. And those digital apples are the ‘bitcoins’ within the system.”
Adopting a beginner’s mindset
There’s a scene in the movie Big where Tom Hanks’ character, a kid in an adult’s body, gets promoted to vice president because he approaches toys with childlike wonder. In a meeting about a toy building that transforms into a robot, he just says, “I don’t get it.” After hearing the marketing data, he shrugs, “I still don’t get it.”
His simple questioning leads to a better idea: a robot that transforms into a prehistoric bug. This approach isn’t new—it’s similar to the Zen concept of shoshin, which means adopting an attitude of openness and lack of preconceptions when learning. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” a Zen master wrote. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”
Maybe that’s still the best way to approach something as complex as crypto. You don’t need to be a Zen master or a 12-year-old boy—you just need to channel a bit of that beginner’s mindset. Ask the simple questions. Don’t assume anything is obvious. Start with the park bench and the apples, not with proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms.
I think that’s what I’ll try next time someone asks me about crypto at a holiday gathering. Start simple. Use analogies that make sense. And remember that sometimes the person who explains it best isn’t the expert, but the person who’s just figured it out themselves.
