A few weeks ago I spoke to a group of financial experts. I was in my game for about 40 minutes talking about our approach to selecting crypto investments, the importance of stablecoins, the upcoming upgrade to Ethereum and so on.
The main partner of the company stopped me from doing this. “Wait,” he said. “So what is bitcoin?”
This story represents everything I’ve learned over the past five years. Everyone recognizes the importance of crypto investing education, but people are at very different stages in their understanding of crypto.
Often the people who should know the most – bankers and financial advisors – are the ones who know the least. (Now their teens are often crypto experts.)
I think of it as a continuum that we’re going to call that Crypto Understanding Continuum:
The Crypto Understanding Continuum.
This is a real problem.
If you’re trying to teach, 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 jump to the 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 half confused.
A related problem is that 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. (The better paid, the more afraid.
One trick that works is asking the audience to raise their hands if they own crypto. This is the single greatest indicator of a person’s expertise: if you own bitcoin, you at least understand the basics. I do that at the beginning of my presentations and then calibrate accordingly.
Many of you are also trying to educate people about crypto investing – your friends, family, co-workers or Becky at the nail salon. I offer this hard-won wisdom: first try to find out what you know.
Our financial and crypto clients often want to create educational content for their clients. “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 clients really want are topics like yield farming with Uniswap (only 2,000 results).
In other words, the Crypto Understanding Continuum is not only a problem for crypto educators, but also a problem for crypto companies. You need to be talking to both crypto-curious and crypto-confident – and everyone in between.
The CUC is a particular concern for us at Bitcoin Market Journal as we redesign our website. We have thousands of sites to organize, and we need a way to quickly find out where they stand in their crypto knowledge.
So we designed a flowchart.
The Crypto Investing Flowchart v1
In 2020, I created a simple flowchart that showed investors how to think about crypto investing in the context of their overall financial goals.
For most crypto investors, this chart had all the appeal of oatmeal. They could care less about maxing out their 401(K), they just want to know, “What crypto should I buy?”
The Crypto Investing Flowchart v2
If the first was too high, my next attempt was probably too granular:
I tried to show our approach of steady drip investing (aka dollar cost averaging) in a portfolio of stocks and blocks: our blockchain believer portfolio.
But I dubbed it the “Blockchain Investing Snowball,” and the chart was rectangular. Snowballs are round.
The Crypto Investing Flowchart v3
The third time is the charm. And what I have in mind is not a flowchart at all but an online tool.
When you come to our home page, imagine a questionnaire (think SurveyMonkey) that assesses your level of knowledge and directs you to the appropriate place on the site. Perhaps it could also give you instant gratification for new crypto investments to consider.
To create this we would need to graph the user flow for our developers to create the questionnaire. Here is my latest attempt:
(click to expand)
We have created a rough version of this survey and I would be very grateful if you could help us test it. All answers are anonymous.
Click here to take the poll and you’ll be able to see the overall responses when you’re done.
Learn Crypto Trading, Yield Farms, Income strategies and more at CrytoAnswers
https://nov.link/cryptoanswers
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