Real people should not care about the Blockchain

Yeah, it’s cool technology but so it is TCP/IP and you don’t hear average Joe talking about packets being transported through a network. In fact in 1993 people who used Internet described it using words like packets, networks of networks, Arpanet, IP and so on. Today ask your mom to describe what Internet is and probably you will hear words like: Communicating with my kids, sharing my grandkids photos and if you ask my 5 year old daughter she will talk about Youtube, Netflix and Skype.

And still, a couple of nerds still remembers that all that, is possible because someone build a standard protocol so all those computers and services can talk to each others. But is not about the underneath technology that supports it but the use cases. Geeks used to be the main user back then, now, they build the applications that real people use.

Millions of TVs are being sold every year and I bet not even 1% of the buyers know how it really works. Or maybe they’ll answer something like “plug it on the wall and to the cable network and you’re done!”

So if we want Bitcoin to go mainstream, we should stop trying to explain how it works and focus about the use cases: free borderless transactions, instant micropayments, smart contracts, document notaries, dad being able to approve his kid’s spending decisions, paying with your cellphone, and probably thousands that I can even imagine today and still need to be invented by geeks, for real people to use.

I get it, for that to happen, all the actual discussions need to take place: BIPS, block size limit, zero knowledge conf, Segregated Witness, Replace by Fee, and so on. But engineers aren’t usually great marketers. And to really scale, block size is not the only limitation. We need to start involving real people who does not care about technology but can still see how great those new use cases are.

The Bitcoin community needs help from top marketers and creative professionals, to position it as the right products and promote them to the right people at the right price.