Many Bitcoiners struggle to get friends and family interested in Bitcoin. This presentation at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville and the article below can help you get better at Bitcoin education.

Hard Truths About Bitcoin Education

Once you understand a bit about Bitcoin and realize the profound impact it has and will have on the world, it is hard not to evangelize it to family and friends. You want them to benefit from Bitcoin too. However, when you try to explain Bitcoin to them, they often aren’t at all receptive to what you are saying.

For many Bitcoiners, this lack of interest leads to frustration, doubling down with more information, and ultimately the recipient changing the topic.

Why won’t they listen? Is it still too early? Are they too old or too naive?

A common reaction is to only look for an external reason why you couldn’t get them interested, instead of also reflecting on an internal one. In many cases, you failed to get someone interested in Bitcoin because most Bitcoiners are not good at explaining Bitcoin.

This problem isn’t unique to Bitcoin. Educating people about complex topics is hard. Few people have the ability to communicate in ways that make others want to listen, but this is usually not considered as the reason why an explanation didn’t have the desired effect.

Let’s observe the typical approach Bitcoiners take to educating others.

The Usual “Orange-Pilling” Approach

When asked about Bitcoin, or even when nobody asks them at all, most Bitcoiners do several of the following things in just a few minutes:

Many Bitcoiners walk away from such a conversation thinking: “Did I do a good job at explaining Bitcoin? Did I manage to convince them? I’ll send more resources so they can start learning and go down the rabbit hole!”

If you read this list and do not understand what is wrong with it, then it is likely that you have frequently been unsuccessful at getting people interested in Bitcoin.

The issue with this approach is that you were focused on the end goal of getting someone into Bitcoin. In your enthusiasm, you overwhelmed them with explanations that resonate with you, without focusing on the other person’s perspective and the delivery of the message. If all you are doing is pushing information onto people to make them care, then yes, it is largely ineffective.

This approach doesn’t just often fail, but it can also be counterproductive. The recipient gets overwhelmed, and many Bitcoiners end up sounding a bit crazy and turn the person off to the idea. When this point is reached, trying again in the future is usually met with disdain. People won’t remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel about a topic. Reversing this damage is very hard.

Many Bitcoiners have gone through this process so many times that they have given up on educating others about Bitcoin. They blame external factors, and assume all of these people will (be forced to) change their minds one day if the price goes up significantly. This is far from a given.

Get Better at Bitcoin Education, Don’t Give Up

There is a growing belief among Bitcoiners that “you cannot orange-pill people, they have to do it themselves”. I fundamentally disagree with this perspective. It’s a cop-out. 

You can absolutely stimulate someone to start learning about Bitcoin. Just because it is hard and you will often fail doesn’t mean you should tell yourself it doesn’t work. You aren’t obligated to teach people about Bitcoin, but be honest with yourself if you’re not good at it or don’t want to spend much time on it.

Many Bitcoiners tell their peers they only educate people who come to them, as if it is a badge of honor. They try to spread this behavior as the standard, but this can be damaging to Bitcoin in the long term.

The risk of giving up on educating people about Bitcoin is that others will get to them first; people with different agendas that will create a world you would hate to live in. Scammers who will mislead your friends and family, or governments who will turn them against you and other “crazy Bitcoiners” to win over their votes so that they can “redistribute” your wealth to cover for their deficit spending.

To raise the odds of Bitcoin being positively perceived by the global population in the long term, it would help if we all become more effective communicators, because we already have personal relations with people. Every Bitcoiner can make an effort here.

When you acknowledge that the average Bitcoiner does not possess the skillset and insights to teach anyone about Bitcoin and has some learning to do, you can start improving how you do it.

I’m not writing this to say: “I’m better at explaining Bitcoin and you should listen to me”. 

Despite spending years educating thousands of people in-person from a large variety of backgrounds about Bitcoin, I have made all of the mistakes above many times over and will likely continue to make some of them. I did learn from this experience and have had very high success rates at getting friends and family interested. 

Below I’ll share practical tips with you to help you become more effective at making people realize Bitcoin is worth spending some time on. 

#1 Don’t Use a Standard Pitch

A major temptation when explaining Bitcoin to people is to fall back to a familiar, rehearsed story that resonates strongly with you.

There is no standard pitch that will get the vast majority of people interested in Bitcoin, no matter how much you refine it. Perhaps promising people significant profits will work in many cases, but you can’t make this promise because they may end up losing money.

Even the most creative examples to explain Bitcoin often won’t land how you want them to, because individuals have too many different interests and perspectives.

Instead of repeating talking points that resonate with you, this approach has been more successful for me:

1. Have a conversation.
2. Understand their mind.
3. Use a tailored approach.

If you can have a conversation with someone rather than lecturing them, they may have a good feeling about you and become more receptive to what you are saying.

Let them do the talking. Ask questions so you can get insights into their mind and find angles that may resonate with them. You’ll want to understand:

It is far easier to make progress when you understand where people are at. In some cases, this 3 step process doesn’t happen in one conversation, but across multiple.

As for using a tailored approach, I will cover this in the tips below.

#2 People Learn in Different Ways

Lots of Bitcoiners love Bitcoin books, podcasts, articles, and videos. They will often recommend them to others as a solution to the “not good at explaining Bitcoin myself” problem. Just offload the education to a popular, expertly-crafted piece of content.

There are two big problems with this approach:

1. People generally prefer quick and simple answers and aren’t going to read or listen to an in-depth breakdown of something they aren’t excited about.
2. Many people don’t like learning through the same formats you do.

I’m not saying don’t recommend educational content to people, but don’t treat it as the first or second step. The existence of many different educational formats is great to give people the options they prefer when they want to go deeper.

In the meantime, you can use the content yourself as a tool to help you get better at education. The more angles, methods, and stories you learn about, the better you can adapt during your own conversations.

Learn by Doing

Some Bitcoiners will say “Make them download a wallet and send them some bitcoin. The best way to learn is to experience it”. It is a cool party trick, but how many of these people will actually “convert”, really start learning, and not lose the bitcoin?

This practical approach works for some people, but it is often followed by inaction. This is an overarching problem with all bitcoin education. The first step or resource can work out well, but there is no clear journey. Many people aren’t self-learners and won’t follow through.

#3 Have Better Conversations

If a standard pitch is not the best approach and there are no shortcuts to a good conversation, then let’s improve how you have those conversations.

Questions, Not Lectures

If you are doing most of the talking and overloading the other person with information, odds are high that they won’t enjoy the conversation. Instead of lecturing them, ask more questions to get them invested in the conversation:

Bitcoin Is Abstract, Visualize it

Bitcoin is intimidating to many people because they can’t hold it in their hands. Bitcoiners often wave their hands around and use metaphors to explain transactions, the blockchain, and mining. Visualizations are a great tool to Bitcoin more accessible.

Build up a folder in your photos on your phone with materials to help you in conversations, so you don’t need to Google them on the spot and risk losing their attention. If you don’t know where to start, check out my collection.

#4 Find a Good Angle

Most people have heard something about Bitcoin after 15 years and many have an opinion based on what corporate media or individuals have told them. 

To figure out their stance, ask what they already know about Bitcoin. This will show you what misconceptions they have, what their concerns are, and what interests them. You can then ask questions about these things.

Imagine someone opens up like this:

“I know it’s a digital currency that isn’t controlled by the government. I know it uses a lot of energy but it’s not used much for payments and it’s mostly speculative. I also heard about a bunch of scams so I don’t really trust it. A friend of mine is really deep into crypto and made a lot of money though.”

How do you unpack all that? What do you tackle first?

You can make your life difficult by trying to analyze all of that in a few seconds and then going off on a 10 minute explanation, jumping through 17 hoops to correct their misconceptions while pulling in all of the great quotes from influencers.

Or, you could ask them: “Which of those do you find most confusing or interesting?”, and then talk a bit about that to keep a conversation going.

Goals, Dreams, and Happiness

Are you struggling to find an angle to help someone understand that it is worth spending time on Bitcoin? It could make sense to take a step back. Why is anyone into Bitcoin?

Many people primarily want to get rich, but there is often a more specific drive:

So what makes this person you are talking to tick? What are they hoping to accomplish in the future and is money holding them back in some way? This can help you understand their motivation to potentially spend time on Bitcoin.

#5 One Step at a Time

In the vast majority of conversations, you do not have enough time and won’t have enough impact to move people along significantly in their journey to learn about Bitcoin.

At this point, most people are aware Bitcoin exists and heard a minimum amount of information about it. Their perception has a big impact on how a conversation will go.

If you don’t pay too much attention to their current perception and just push Bitcoin onto them, you will instead push many of them away. It takes time to get some people interested in learning. If you’re not that close to the person, then maybe one conversation is all you have with them. At best you can get them slightly more interested or open to it. Focus on that, not on getting them all the way.

In your conversations, you want to get a feel for how the other person views Bitcoin at the moment, so you can determine how far you can realistically shift their perspective. This is why asking questions is so important.

#6 Not Everyone Wants to Be Convinced

If the other person gets the feeling that you aren’t really listening to them and just want to shove your passion onto them, your conversation will be completely counterproductive. Empathy helps you identify situations when you should not be talking about Bitcoin.

In my experience these are the most common reasons people don’t want to be convinced:

1. They are too resistant to change:People naturally dislike change, and Bitcoin represents a lot of change at once for many people. It combines everything people don’t understand about computers with everything they don’t understand about money, to then challenge everything they thought they knew about politics and society.
2. Their life is in chaos: You may be convinced that Bitcoin is a long-term solution to their immediate problems, but in times of chaos, people need short-term solutions, and Bitcoin often isn’t a short-term solution.
3. They were wrong before and now want to be right: Many people feel like they missed out on Bitcoin by not buying after they first discovered it. They think it is no longer realistic for them to earn large amounts of money by buying bitcoin, and thus that it isn’t worth getting involved anymore.In addition, after previously being wrong about Bitcoin, some now desperately want to be right about not “buying in late”. If they’re right and they buy in late, they lose their money to the people they envy. If they’re not late, they admit being wrong. It is a lose-lose scenario for them.Most people believe that Bitcoin is a speculative investment to get rich quickly, rather than a tool to not get poor slowly. It can be difficult to change their mind, because they may have seen others get rich, or really want to be rich themselves. This is the primary audience for the countless crypto scams out there, and getting them off this path can be very hard. The only thing that has worked for me to convince people in this situation is showing them the life that could be: sleeping well at night, living a healthier lifestyle, building good relationships, and not thinking about making money all day.

#7 Acknowledge Limitations

The final tip I want to give is to acknowledge Bitcoin’s limitations. You don’t need to make it look better than it is, it is already great, but not perfect, and that’s ok. Don’t get tempted to make it look better than it is, only to have to backpeddle some of what you said.

Acknowledge your limitations

Understanding Bitcoin does not mean you are right about everything or have all of the answers. It is better to admit you don’t have an answer right now, than give a half-baked one you can’t back up that undermines your entire credibility.

When people ask you if now is a good time to buy, or to make price predictions, it is best to make it clear that nobody has a realistic answer to these questions. Nobody can predict Bitcoin’s price, no matter how wealthy they are or how many lines they draw on a graph. The focus should be on the long term. If it isn’t, many people will end up selling the first time the price drops and all your effort will be undone.

Acknowledge Bitcoin’s limitations

Bitcoin is challenging to understand. It doesn’t scale globally today. Self-custody is intimidating for people who can’t even use secure passwords. Transaction fees can be high sometimes. Not everyone can be expected to understand ways around that.

Bitcoin doesn’t have to be perfect. What matters is the overall shift from a financial system that is increasingly breaking down, to an alternative system that is gradually being improved.

By being honest about ways in which the alternative isn’t perfect, your arguments become more credible and you build trust. Remember that the ultimate goal of this entire exercise is to make people feel good about their conversation with you, not to be right about 10 out of 10 arguments.

Summary

To wrap up, here is everything you need to level up your Bitcoin conversations.

1. Don’t use a standard pitch.
2. Remember that people learn in different ways.
3. Have better conversations, ask questions, and visualize the abstract.
4. Find the angle(s) that resonate with them.
5. Prepare your mindset to take it one step at a time, don’t overwhelm them.
6. Learn to identify when not to talk about Bitcoin.
7. Acknowledge your own and Bitcoin’s limitations.

Learning about Bitcoin is a journey, and getting people excited about the start of their journey is a challenge. If you can give them a good feeling about your conversation with them, you’ll be off to a great start, and they will be more receptive to a good follow-up.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~Maya Angelou