How to talk about Crypto at the Christmas dinner table

The Christmas season can be a great opportunity to get your family and friends involved in something you feel passionate about, like cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, this can be a confusing concept for people to pick up. It’s often misrepresented in pop culture as a fad or even a conspiracy theory. This can be a major hurdle for those who try to get their family and loved ones interested and involved in crypto. There is a stereotypical image of a geeky tech wiz trying to bring down the banks that the community must overcome.

Here are the three major blockers that can cause people to be weary of cryptocurrencies:

• They’re hard to understand
• They get too much negative press
• They’re difficult to access and use
• If you want to expose your family to crypto this Christmas, here are some ways to overcome all three of these obstacles:

Teaching Blockchain to Grandma

Full disclosure: cryptocurrency is not a completely different way of using money. If anything it works the same as old money. They share the characteristics of scarcity, security, exchangeability and fungibility. The differences really come down to tangibility and the method of keeping track of digital coins from how traditional money (known in the crypto world as fiat) is commonly tracked. A centralized ledger is used to track money in the present, whereas crypto offers to implement a decentralized ledger. This is known as the blockchain ledger.

As someone who has used cryptocurrency in the past, these concepts seem trivial. However, it can still be difficult to explain this to someone who may not even use a next-gen smartphone. To explain blockchain to grandma, or even to your five year old niece or nephew, you can use the famous apple analogy of crypto. This is a simple way of explaining cryptocurrency and it goes something like this:

The Apple Analogy

Imagine if I gave you an apple. I just physically handed it to you. Now I don’t have the ability to give it to someone else, but you can either choose to keep the apple yourself, or give it to someone else, maybe in exchange for something you want. That’s how money works.
Now imagine if the apple I gave you was digital. There’s no way for you to check to see that I haven’t sent the same apple to Peter or someone else. This means that the apple is no longer valuable enough to exchange for things you want. This is known as the double spending problem of digital money.
We can use a ‘ledger’, a fancy name for an accounting book, to record any time you or Peter, trade the digital apple. I’ll be the bank. My job is to make sure to track when the digital apple is traded. I am also the only one who can give out brand new digital apples. This way, I will always know who has it.
But if I was not good at being a bank, then the ledger could no longer be trusted.
So, what if you and Peter also had copies of the ledger? In this case, if you chose to give Peter an apple in exchange for ice cream, we can all check our ledger to see if you have an apple to give. Then everyone will record a new trade in their ledger showing you have ice cream and Peter has an apple. This is how cryptocurrency works!

Taking off the Metaphorical Tin Foil Hat

Grandma may not be the toughest person to convince at the dinner table. Those who have heard little whispers of crypto but don’t fully understand it may be the most difficult to persuade. Especially with the media fear mongering in recent months about huge price swings, hacking of exchanges, and Bitcoin bottoming out, it’s no wonder they may have some reservations. We all have an uncle who likes to play the devil’s advocate, so there are some rebuttals to his snappy questions that you can find here.

Show them how it works!

Talking about concepts that are not easily visualized can be an arduous task, especially if your loved ones are not very tech savvy. It can be tough to break through the state of apathy that people around your Christmas table may feel towards crypto. Talk of encryption and hashing algorithms will really be falling on deaf ears in this case, so the best strategy is to not talk at all! Why not show them instead?

Blockchain Explorers

Blockchain explorers can be a great tool to help a curious family member actually visualize the blockchain ledger behind cryptocurrencies. These ledgers include details of people’s wallet addresses to the transactions they have participated in. Even executing one transaction can help explain the concepts of public keys, block heights, transactions ID’s and miners to someone who may not have understood simply by hearing about it. The technical jargon on its own can make such ideas difficult to grasp.

Shop Online with Crypto!

When it comes down to it, most people view money in a very specific way; it’s used to buy and sell stuff. This is a major hurdle that cryptocurrency must overcome in the short term, since not all businesses accept digital coins. However, there are many ways of getting exactly the items you want using your cryptocurrency. The holidays can be a fantastic opportunity to indoctrinate a family member into the world of crypto, by showing them how they can actually use these coins to buy whatever they want.

All in all, the transformational nature of cryptocurrency can really inspire one to believe in its future potential. Naturally, people like to share something groundbreaking that they’ve discovered with their friends and family. This can be troubling if your loved ones are not very tech savvy or they’ve already subscribed a negative narrative surrounding this tech. Fortunately, there are ways of overcoming these hurdles. So it’s time to fire up the chimney and make this a Crypto Christmas! Happy holidays, everyone!

Originally posted at GetSmart Hub.