After being tagged by a bitcoiner journalist, Rowling asked about Bitcoin. Next thing she knew, legions of passionate crypto community members had come flooding her with their explanations. But for all their efforts, the Harry Potter author still couldn’t comprehend.
What’s interesting to note is that J.K. Rowling’s failure to grasp Bitcoin might tell us something about why it’s taking so long for crypto to reach the masses on a global scale. Is Bitcoin really that difficult or is the prestigious writer just not technically inclined?
Crypto Twitter to the Rescue
Twitter has no shortage of people who want to share their new-found crypto knowledge to others, especially to public figures.
A lot of them concocted Harry Potter analogies to make it easier for the author to understand.
Others only linked to videos, blog posts, books, while Tron founder Justin Sun and Hodlnaut offered to send the writer some Bitcoin. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Nuggets News CEO Alex Saunders, and Elon Musk gave some of the most comprehensive answers.
But no matter how many times crypto twitter beats it into her head, she never understood Bitcoin. It needs to be noted that she was under the influence of alcohol while reading those tweets, which might have contributed to her a lack of comprehension.
However, she did say that she still couldn’t comprehend even when her close friends who understand Bitcoin very well tried to explain it to her while “stone-cold sober”.
J.K. Rowling Represents the Average Person Outside Crypto
On the flipside, J.K. Rowling’s honesty might help us understand how non-techie individuals perceive the crypto industry and technology.
We often find people articulate crypto concepts by saying words like “p2p”, “decentralized”, or “network”, and mixing them together, then assuming laypeople could actually fathom their content. Apparently they can’t. Yet most of the crypto blogs, youtube videos, and illustrations describe concepts in this manner.
Not everyone is like Elon Musk or works in tech, finance, or economics. Think of the people who work in industries like education, agriculture, mining, fashion, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, publishing, etc.
And not everybody is too thrilled to read a whole book or spend hours of research on a subject that they were never interested in to begin with.
As obvious as this sounds, it took a drunk famous author to make it crystal clear.
Perhaps this might serve as a wake-up call to every crypto evangelist. Maybe we should slow down and try not to overwhelm those who aren’t ready to fully understand Bitcoin.
Perhaps we need to make our explanations more basic, or more mysterious and alluring so they’d put more effort into learning.
