Learning from someone just one step ahead
I had a holiday dinner recently where I was asked to explain crypto to someone who hadn’t even heard of Ethereum. Honestly, I did a terrible job. I jumped from proof-of-stake to smart contracts to DeFi, then back to what a blockchain even is. I’m pretty sure I left them more confused than when we started.
It made me realize something important. The best person to learn from isn’t necessarily the expert who thinks about something every day. Sometimes it’s the person who’s just one step ahead of you, or someone who only engages with the topic occasionally.
Ben Thompson’s clear explanation
Take Ben Thompson, for example. He writes the Stratechery newsletter and mentions crypto maybe twice a year. Yet he explains why it matters better than most crypto experts I know. He starts at the very beginning: “Blockchains are the idea that disparate groups can come to a consensus without any kind of centralized authority.”
That decentralization gives crypto all the qualities of digital goods—endlessly duplicable, universally accessible—but with scarcity. Thompson finds this interesting because, as a digital newsletter writer, he faces the problem of monetizing infinitely duplicable digital goods.
In practice though, he sees crypto’s main value in peer-to-peer money transfer. That’s why he focuses on stablecoins. Stablecoins have the universal ledger, scarcity, and fast transactions he likes, without the wild price swings and pure speculation.
“What you end up with is basically this currency that operates like the internet,” he says. That’s the definition I wish I had at dinner.
Why traditional finance cares
Thompson also explains why this matters for fintech companies. If you want to set up a financial entity, you don’t have to build the entire backend to track everyone’s finances. You can build directly on top of a blockchain instead.
This lets fintechs offload the difficult parts—holding money, reconciling accounts, keeping transaction ledgers, and establishing trust. “You get all that for free with blockchains.”
My dinner neighbor, who works in real estate, would probably see the appeal in that. Thompson’s explanation from 2024 feels even more relevant now at the end of 2025. Token prices might be down, but traditional finance companies like Stripe, BlackRock, and Visa are increasingly interested in moving parts of their business to blockchains.
The simplest Bitcoin explanation
There’s a Medium post from 2013 that offers what I think is the most accessible introduction to Bitcoin. The author uses a simple analogy about exchanging apples on a park bench to explain how blockchains make digital apples behave like physical ones.
These blockchains “live in everybody’s computers where all the transactions that have ever happened, from all time, in digital apples will be recorded in it.” Sending one of those apples becomes “as good as seeing a physical apple leave my hand and drop into your pocket.”
It’s also permissionless—just like exchanging real apples on a bench. You don’t need “Uncle Tommy” (a stand-in for banks) to make it valid.
This setup leads to a clear explanation of proof-of-work: you could participate in updating the ledger and get rewarded with digital apples. It also explains scarcity, since that’s the only way to create more digital apples in the system.
“That system I explained exists. It’s called the Bitcoin protocol. And those digital apples are the ‘bitcoins’ within the system.”
Adopting a beginner’s mindset
There’s a scene in the movie Big where Tom Hanks’ character, a kid in an adult’s body, gets promoted to vice president because he approaches toys with childlike wonder. In a product meeting, he responds to a pitch by saying, “I don’t get it.” Even after hearing the marketing data, he says, “I still don’t get it.”
His simple questioning leads to a better proposal. This approach isn’t new—it’s similar to the Zen concept of shoshin, which means adopting an attitude of openness and lack of preconceptions when learning.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” a Zen master wrote. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”
Maybe that’s the best way to approach something as complex as crypto. Not as an expert trying to impress, but as a beginner trying to understand. You don’t need to be a Zen master or a 12-year-old boy—you just need to channel a bit of that beginner’s mindset.
