Ask Doctor Bitcoin: How do I explain Bitcoin to my friends? [Free, #5]
Coinbase is going public today. You've been in blockchain and bitcoin for a while now. You know you're going to get snowed under with this question this week. Be prepared!
As Neeraj Agrawal of Coin Center sarcastically tweeted yesterday: “The cryptocurrency story to watch tomorrow will probably be the Coinbase IPO.” Coinbase is actually doing a direct listing, but becoming a publicly traded company will obviously catapult them back into the news, which is undoubtedly going to result in a peppering of questions from folks in your circles to you, asking you to explain what the heck Bitcoin is, and what you think the price is going to do.
That’s the focus of our newsletter this week: How to explain bitcoin and blockchain to your friends. Every time there’s a bull cycle, I get an avalanche of calls from folks who remember I mentioned bitcoin to them that one time. In fact, that’s the genesis of this newsletter and the original Ask Doctor Bitcoin columns.
I created these resources so that I could respond to friends and family with a YouTube link or a blog post I’d written on the topic that could answer their questions, rather than re-type it for the tenth time in a week.
And now, with access to this newsletter and the archive, you’ll have those same resources to use yourself this bull cycle!
Of course, if your copy+paste fingers are tired, you can always gift a subscription!
(or, you can always just pass along my substack address, and they can subscribe themselves).
Blockchain Bulletin
Bitcoin exceeded $60K, Ether reaches new all-time high. Bitcoin exceeded $60,000 early Saturday, April 10, 2021 and Ether set another record high at $2,190 over the same weekend.
Crypto Climate Accord launches to make crypto industry 100% renewable by 2030. Inspired by the Paris Climate Agreement, Energy Web, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Alliance for Innovative Regulation (AIR) announced the Crypto Climate Accord to make the crypto industry 100% renewable by 2030.
Coinbase couple gets married on Ethereum blockchain. Two Coinbase employees got married and wrote an Ethereum smart contract to record their marriage on the blockchain for $580 using NFT wedding rings.
Blockchain Behind the Scenes
Atari looks to NFTs with new blockchain division. Atari has divided into two parts, with one division that will focus on games and one that will deal with blockchain research and development.
Filecoin donates 50,000 FIL to the Internet Archive. The Filecoin Foundation donated 50,000 FIL to the Internet Archive, best known for the Wayback Machine, to advance its efforts in preserving and providing access to human knowledge.
Blockchain Deep Dive: How do I explain Bitcoin to my friends?
Bitcoin is the reference architecture for blockchain, which is an internet protocol designed for mitigating or removing the requirement for trust between counterparties.
Reference architecture: a name for an implementation of an idea that you can use as an ideal template for the thing it's a reference for.
Protocol: name for a type of software or networking technology that represents a class of software.
Really, blockchain is about removing the requirement for trust. The key to explaining it is finding a business case where trust is typically exploited that your friend can relate to. In the paid version, I go over a couple examples.
Remember, real world examples where trust requirements are a problem trump theoretical futuristic possibilities when explaining things. That’s why people always say: “Bitcoin fixes this.”