The Crypto Understanding Continuum (click to expand).
This is a real problem. When you’re trying to educate, you need to know if your audience is “101” or “Ph.D.” In this industry, it’s usually a mix of both. So you either start at the beginner level (and bore the experts), or you skip to boss level (and lose the newbies). I’ve tried splitting my talks -- 50% crypto curious, 50% crypto confident – but that usually leaves half the audience bored and the other half confused. A related problem is people don’t want to look stupid. So, someone might have fallen off the Understanding Bus miles ago, but they’re afraid to raise their hand. (Often, the more highly paid, the more afraid.) One trick that works is asking the audience to raise their hands if they own crypto. This is the single biggest indicator of someone’s expertise: if you own bitcoin, you at least understand the basics. I do that at the beginning, then calibrate my talk accordingly. Many of you, too, are trying to educate people about crypto investing – your friends, family, co-workers, or Becky at the nail salon. I offer this hard-won wisdom: try to find out what they know first. Our financial and crypto clients often want to do educational content for their customers. “Let’s do a series explaining what bitcoin is,” they usually suggest. Well, last time I checked, Google had 10,600,000 results for “what is bitcoin.” Meanwhile, what their more advanced customers really want is topics like how to do yield farming with Uniswap (only 2,000 results). In other words, the Crypto Understanding Continuum is not just a problem for crypto educators, it’s also a problem for crypto companies. You need to speak to both the crypto-curious and the crypto-confident – and everyone in between. The CUC is especially a problem for us at Bitcoin Market Journal, because we’re redesigning our website. We’ve got thousands of pages to organize, and we need a way to quickly figure out where they are in their crypto knowledge. So we designed a flowchart. The Crypto Investing Flowchart v1 Back in 2020, I made a simple flowchart that showed investors how to think about crypto investing in the context of their overall financial goals. |