3 Guidelines for Explaining Complicated Tech

How we explain blockchain in 2 minutes.

TryCrypto’s vision is to make blockchain more accessible to everyone. Creating educational content is one of the ways we’re working towards this vision. Merkle is my alter ego who explains blockchain in short videos.

I’m still learning and honing in on explaining blockchain in short, simple, and effective videos, but I want to share my approach thus far:

1. Simplifying is necessary (and difficult)

I try to write the video scripts so that anyone above the age of 10 years old can understand what I’m trying to convey. The goal here isn’t for viewers to become blockchain experts. We’re going for introductions — a nice welcoming handshake to the blockchain world. That being said, it’s not easy to boil down blockchain into a couple of minutes and many things are overlooked in the process.

2. Focus on the concepts that are innately human

There are many facets of blockchain technology that make it revolutionary. I’ve tried to focus on the concepts that people already understand (the democratic nature of the blockchain, for example), which has helped me get to the point faster and made the videos easier to follow. I’ve written many scripts with a complex setup and narrative — none of them have worked because the setup becomes less relatable and harder to follow.

3. Focus on applications, not how it works

I started out by trying to explain how blockchain works, but this isn’t the selling point of blockchain. You can explain to many people how the internet works, but until you show them applications (Google, Facebook, or online banking), they’re not sold. This is why I’ve tried to focus on potential blockchain applications instead of explaining the technology. There are many resources that already exist to explain the mechanics of blockchain and they are fantastic! I’m hoping TryCrypto videos are the bridge to get people interested and excited so they want to dig in deeper and find videos about how the technology works.

Ultimately, the goal is to provide easy-to-understand content. I think focusing on these 3 goals has helped in that process, but I’m still learning and these goals will change as we get more feedback and ideas.

A few hopes for the future of TryCrypto educational content:

• Find a way to balance the “selling point” with not overhyping blockchain and potential uses.
• Build a resource library for people hoping to learn more about blockchain beyond Merkle videos.
• Make TryCrypto content available to consume in different channels (podcasts, more videos, blog posts, etc.).

If you like the videos, have specific ideas you’d like to see TryCrypto explain, or have feedback, please let us know on the community page or email us!