A holiday guide to explaining crypto to your relatives

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“I don’t get it. I still don’t get it.”
— Tom Hanks, Big

At a holiday dinner last night, I was asked to explain crypto to someone who is so new to the topic they had not previously heard of Ethereum.

I did a terrible job.

From attempting explanations of proof-of-stake, to smart contracts, to DeFi, to DePIN and then back to what a blockchain even is, I’m certain I left my audience far more confused than I found them.

It was a reminder that the best person to learn from is often just one step ahead of you on the subject, not 10 or a 100 — or someone that thinks about a subject twice a year, not every day.

Ben Thompson makes the tech case for crypto

For example, the tech expert Ben Thompson, who mentions crypto in his Stratechery newsletter about twice a year, explains why it matters better than any of the crypto experts who think about it daily.

Thompson helpfully starts at the beginning: “Blockchains are the idea that disparate groups can come to a consensus without any kind of centralized authority.”

That decentralization endows crypto with “all the qualities” of digital goods — endlessly duplicable, universally accessible, easily distributed — and yet, “it has scarcity.”

Thompson thinks this is conceptually interesting because it solves a problem he encounters as a writer of digital newsletters: “Digital goods are fundamentally hard to monetize because they are infinitely duplicable.”

In practice, however, he recognizes that crypto is mostly interesting as a way to send money peer-to-peer — which is why the case he makes for crypto is mostly about stablecoins.

Stablecoins, he says, represent “all internet sort of things” that he finds interesting — a universal ledger, scarcity, fast transactions — and none of the “downside” things: “the pure speculation on a coin going up, the wild swings in value.”

Net-net, “what you end up with [with stablecoins] is basically this currency that operates like the internet.”

That’s the definition I needed at dinner last night: Crypto is a currency that acts like the internet.

Thompson also explains why this is useful for the kind of fintech businesses he often writes about: “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 allows fintechs to “offload” all the difficult parts of finance to a blockchain: holding money, reconciling accounts, keeping a ledger of transactions, and — perhaps most importantly — establishing trust.

“You get all that for free with blockchains.”

My neighbor at dinner — a real estate guy — would surely have seen the appeal in that.

Thompson’s explainer, offered way back in 2024, feels even more relevant at the end of 2025: Token prices are down bad, but traditional finance companies — like Stripe, BlackRock and Visa — are increasingly excited about offloading parts of their business to blockchains.

Thompson’s podcast will help you explain why.

The best Bitcoin explainer

A Medium post from 2013 offers the most accessible introduction I’ve seen to what Bitcoin is and why it matters — and your best chance to explain it to beginners over the holidays.

The author begins on a park bench, using a simple apple exchange to illustrate the core purpose of blockchains: making 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 is a stand-in for banks, of course.

This setup makes for a deft 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 the idea of scarcity, too: “In fact, that’s the only way to create more digital apples in the system.”

With all that established, Bitcoin becomes far more understandable: “That system I explained exists. It’s called the Bitcoin protocol. And those digital apples are the ‘bitcoins’ within the system.”

This makes crypto money near-infinitely divisible and near-instantly sendable. To anywhere, no permission required.

But that’s not all that blockchains can do: “I can even make other digital things ride on top of these digital apples! It’s digital after all. Maybe I can attach some text on it — a digital note. Or maybe I can attach more important things; like say a contract, or a stock certificate, or an ID card…”

Perhaps disappointingly, crypto is only now — 12 years later — starting to put stock certificates and ID cards on blockchains.

But now that it’s finally happening, you should be ready to explain how and why it is.

Adopt a beginner’s mindset

In the classic movie Big, Josh (Tom Hanks) is promoted from data entry to vice president of product development just two weeks into the job — all because the CEO is captivated by his childlike wonder for the toys they make.

Josh jumps straight to the top because he has the unfair advantage of being a kid trapped in a man’s body — this gives him insight into the company’s toys that no toy expert can match.

In a high-stakes product meeting with adults, he responds to a pitch for a toy building that transforms into a robot as any kid would: “I don’t get it.”

After the marketing data is explained to him, he shrugs, “I still don’t get it.”

His childlike line of questioning and reasoning then leads to a much better proposal: a robot that transforms into a prehistoric bug.

Josh’s method is not new.

The Zen concept of shoshin — adopting an attitude of openness, eagerness and lack of preconceptions when learning — dates back to the 13th century.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” a Zen master wrote. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”

This might still be the best way to learn a topic as complex and often bewildering as crypto: Approach it with the open mind of a beginner.

Fortunately, you don’t have to spend decades becoming a Zen master to practice shoshin (or be a 12-year-old boy) — you only have to channel Tom Hanks.

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