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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

When we say we "understand money" we mean we know how to spend it, aquire it and store it.

When someone says they "understand bitcoin" it means grappling with cryptography, mining, ledgers, economics, game theory, fiat currencies, deflation, dapps, etc. etc.

Very few people need to really understand all of that to "get" bitcoin, mainly because most of the use cases aren't figured out. Most people are overthinking at this point and not attacking it from a "how is this useful to me and what do I need to know" perspective, but trying to grok it all, which is pretty hard.

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> Very few people need to really understand all of that to "get" bitcoin

Except when a fork comes, or why control of 51% of the hashing power is bad.

Only miners and investors should care about this. Normal people should be able to use Btc without worrying about it.

Until transaction fees start to rise due those people pushing their own agenda on the network.

Cost me a couple dollars last night to send 70 dollars in btc to a friend.

Last month it was 3 dollars and change. I'm thankful it was slightly more reasonable.

I might use an alt coin for awhile to save on fees.

3 dollars per payment seems extremely expensive - that's how much an inefficient international bank wire transfer costs, with the more reasonable bank-to-bank systems (including international e.g. in EU) costing a few cents.

That seems very expensive, I was expecting it to be practically free as I'd heard it was transforming the money-sending space??

How much does Paypal charge to send $70 to a friend, isn't it free?

It is super expensive, but this is more of an issue with bitcoin's design than the actual concept. Bitcoin is the first blockchain tech created, there are many others that have a much closer to zero cost of transaction, and will continue to do so.

It's kind of like saying the web in 1991 was expensive to use.

The two examples you provided can be understood at a lay level which is sufficient in most situations that you'd find yourself in. Now, if you were attempting to build a product or service that interacts with the Bitcoin protocol, of course you'd have to have a much wider and deeper set of knowledge of how the protocol selects the best chain and the different attack surfaces that exist.

I don't understand the systemic nuances of the SWIFT payment system but I was able to conceptually understand how it works without too much trouble.

Yes, that is complicated.

But equally messy was the origination of the Euro. Equally messy (maybe even more so) was the introduction of "legal tender" in the US in the 1860s-1890s. Equally messy was the abolition of "National Bank Notes" and the brief period where we had bank notes, Federal Reserve notes, United States notes, and Silver Certificates all existing and only mostly compatible. Or the Indian demonetization of the 500 Rs note. Or the Cypriot bank seizures. Less messy, but still complicated for those affected by it, was the seizure of gold bullion or the closing of the redemption window in the US.

Money is complicated, and Bitcoin has less history than any of these currencies.

I agree with this. I think hardly anyone truly understands the money creation mechanisms in play for conventional money, yet they're more than comfortable with using it... Sometimes, it would seem that even the people creating money in our standard economies don't fully understand what they're doing!

Yeah, I have a rough idea of how bitcoin works and I also have a rough idea of how the current banking system works. Enough that I am able to use them both but I certainly am not going to be giving talks on either of them. There are still times when the standard banking system is a blackbox to many people, they just know that it works and are happy to leave it at that.

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