How do you explain Monero to someone who has never touched crypto?

@StereoSwap Just say it's cool money. People don't understand technical stuff, but they're sure know how it felt having something cool. That's what carry the bitcoin price

@StereoSwap This is a bit tricky. I've experimented with my grandmother, and she simply tells me to "invest in things for her." There's a hurdle we need to clear, but the concept should be just as easy to grasp as how boomers have adopted AI. They can go straight to Google and get an AI answer, but I don't yet know what crypto answer will work.

I just say it's private electronic cash, how it's cheap to use, quick and has zero restrictions when sending.

If they ask to explain I quickly go through the 3 technologies that define Monero and its privacy.

If they ask for more, the third time, is when I actually break down digital scarcity and the concept behind cryptocurrencies.

This reverse approach I found works best because you can't really tell how much one would care about this topic, so I just give the basic shit first, and if they seem interested and keep asking, I go deeper.

How about Monero is like your money as an ender chest, but also way better. It's not a perfect analogy, but it is essentially the result that you see when using it to a degree.

• Nobody except you knows what's in your ender chest unless you tell them
• nobody can take stuff out of your ender chest without you giving it to them
• idk exactly how it works in Minecraft, but it's probably connected to your player which is kind of like keys
• You can open up your ender chest wherever and with whatever ender chest you want
• anyone can craft an ender chest and the recipe is known so it's like open source

A regular chest is like cash because anyone could rob you and you could lose your items.

A regular chest at your friend's base where you are forced to keep your items and then they take them and loan them out is like the banking system. Permissioned, fake, not private because your friend sees all your items.

Problems with analogy:

• The ender chest doesn't represent a ledger at all
• You can put anything in the ender chest
• The ender chest isn't decentralized because it's on one minecraft world, but it appears so to the player
• With Monero you can store as much as you want, ender chests have a maximum amount of items

Let me know what you think of my analogy how I can improve it, if it's terrible, etc.

The thing is, most people don't even understand banking. It's just what is the default. People demand an explanation for crypto because it's novel technology. No normie has ever demanded it to be explained how money is stored in their bank account. If crypto was the default, regular people wouldn't ask how ledgers work, they'd just use their wallet as easily as they use Venmo.

We can kind of see this with custodial crypto. People don't worry about seed phrases or blockchain, they just see the number in their account and that's good enough.

• banks can take forever (no weekends, only business days), they have limits on amounts you can spend, flag things on dumb things and can close an account for any arbitrary reason, it's a headache to maintain with all the administrative work just to open an account and maintain it
• with crypto you're your own bank, no account closure risk, takes seconds to make a new account with paper wallet
• why monero instead of bitcoin? for your own safety: https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks/blob/master/README.md