Teaching People About Crypto

Helping others

Investing in crypto really is like gambling. Crypto technology allows uncensored and fast payments to be sent across the world, something previously unheard of. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Despite all the cool capabilities of this technology, people spend their time arguing like children on Twitter about why Bitcoin’s price changed three percent, or blindly following some influencer and trusting their life savings into whatever garbage project they promote.

The best way to teach people about crypto is to make it fun, fast, and yet still informative. Coinbase does a great job of this. They have a series of videos you can watch on different tokens, which are generally a minute or less. After the quiz you’re asked a question about the token’s network. If you get it right, you receive crypto as a reward.

With this, you have to absorb the information in the video if you want to get the quiz question right. Answering correctly gets you crypto and knowledge, for only a minute or two of your time. Most of the time there are multiple videos, with only one question per video. This is playing to peoples short attention spans. I’ve seen people struggle to sit through a minute long TikTok, and Coinbase knows this. They make the videos short, with a question at the end of each one, to really give you the most dopamine.

My media feed is full of ideas and conversations from the smartest people in the crypto industry. Because of this contextual bias, I’ll end up doubting my knowledge. As digital assets become increasingly popular, I have more friends and people I know coming to me to ask for advice. Of course, I love to help them. But as they ask me questions, I realize how early this industry is.

I spend my time with young, smart, and tech-savvy people. However, many of them have hardly any idea what a blockchain is, or have never heard of a smart contract. This shows that there is a large, impressionable, amount of people yet to get into crypto. Nine times out of ten, I could walk up to someone on the street and ask them what a blockchain is. Their response, “What the hell is that?”

When influencers promote pump or dump projects to their fans, they get people to invest that weren’t previously in crypto. Those people then lose their money, and now they have an unfavorable look on the whole idea, and rightfully so. If my first experience with crypto was getting rug-pulled to basically zero I’d be skeptical too.

Earlier this week, I wrote about how the industry can use gaming as a segue to get people into the industry. That’s one approach. It’s a great way to get people to learn about the technology in a way that’s fun. There are certain people who are passionate enough about crypto to read the thirty-page white paper of a project, but that’s not most people.

As a new asset class, it’s important that people learn technical analysis on crypto. As adoption continues to grow, more corporations and businesses are going to need people that have a fundamental understanding of how the market works, just like with stocks. When working with crypto, it is critical that you have at least a decent understanding of why price movements happen and what triggers them. That being said, it seems that a lot of people often ignore the technology side of things completely, and instead focus only on the price and narratives.

Narratives

Do your own research. It’s so important not to buy into hype or FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) and make decisions for themselves. They need to ignore the dominant narratives, ideas spread around by communities within the crypto industry, or outside of it.

Naturally, anyone who’s trying to make money off of an asset wants it to go up. Someone who wants to buy more wants it to go down. The asset may have a negative effect on someone’s job, career, or industry, so they want it to go down. When you see someone, even a celebrity or big name, tweet something like “DOGE to the moon,” or “the market is now bearish,” stop and think for a moment.

Why did they tweet that? Do they have an ulterior motive? Did they cite actual analysis or news for why that’s going to happen? If your favorite model or YouTuber promotes a project, that doesn’t mean it’s good. Back in mid-January I wrote about Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather promoting a total rug-pull project.

Hopefully, more exchanges and other crypto websites start taking a more educational approach. It’s important to spread information about crypto in a way that anyone can digest, or else the industry will be plagued with misinformation.