Topic: 2012-12-1 LeMonde.fr - Avec Bitcoin, payer et vendre sans les banques (Read 3062 times)

And what's more scandalous that the currency systems we all are using? 

Media, let's say, nourishes itself on scandals.

No, you should not expect an explanation from a journalist, you should expect vulgarization.

Grondilu, it really depends on your audience.
Most people don't have a clue on how paracétamol works, for example, and don't want to understand it, but they'll use it because they understand its effects.
Just take a look at wikipedia page for Paracétamol. Most people would be immediately "frightened" by the first picture on the right and close the page all of the sudden. The greatest majority of people wouldn't even start reading it. I didn't.

Technical audiences will be intrigued by Bitcoin and will want to learn how it works. But Le Monde writes to a broad, generic audience. Trying to explain how Bitcoin works to such audience is like trying to explain how paracétamol works. Don't waste your time. Actually, if you do, you're more likely to scare people away than to make them interested in it.

I'm sorry but I'll disagree.  It's totally normal and expected from a journalist to at least attempt to explain how things work.

It's just that this particular journalist has made a terrible job.

Journalists writing to a generic public should not try to explain how Bitcoin works.

Imagine some revolutionary new medicine has just been invented, and you're going to write about it, targeting a generic audience. Will you try to explain how its molecules interact with the human body, showing the chemical formulas and all in fancy charts? Or you will just talk about its general effects and its eventual risks?

Somebody talking/writing about Bitcoin to the general public should take the same approach. Do not try to explain how the system works. Do not mention "mining". Just explain Bitcoin is a currency with no authority, supported by a distributed network of people all around the world. Explain that the money is "stored" in a file, and that if you lose the file, you lose the money. Don't talk about "addresses", instead call them "accounts", but say that accounts should be disposable: you may have as many as you want, you should only use each once, and you don't need to remember its number, the software will do it for you. You may say the wallet file contains all accounts.

Some people will ask: "But how are the first coins created?". Answer briefly: "they're given as reward for those who voluntarily support the distributed network, it's an expensive task." If the person asks "But what exactly do these people do to support the network? Can I support it too?", you may just answer "That's complicated, I can't answer it without entering into technical details. People who do this are professionals. You should just know that it's them who verify that transactions are good to go".

In other words, avoid going too technical - and there's no way to explain how Bitcoin actually works without going too technical. So just explain what it can do and how to use it.

By the way, while otherwise well written and well documented, the article contains an interesting oversimplification, confusing the number of blocks with the number of transactions.
It might be easier to explain Bitcoin, first without the concept of block, second with the concept of block as a way to address the scalability issue.

I like Le Monde.

Yes, bitcoin is not complicated, it's new.

If people do not see why they have to make a little effort to understand, they won't.
Even the basic of the basic, (not the block chain and all) but why copy and past something strange?Why paying fees? (normal people think the credit card network is free at least in france). Why to change?

For instance, i use credit card every day. I have no idea how it works, is it complicated? i just don't care...
I use credit card every day because i can buy anything from a piece of bread to a car, very fast, and i'm sure that if i loose it i just lost 5 euro. Much better than cash!
If someone presented me the Credit card network without teasing me before, i would just run away. Or answer, yeah looks nice, didn't understand anything.
NASA do not sell there spaceship saying how they are made, they sell it saying we might find life or whatever.
Are president elected on technic ability? Not so sure...
Normal poeple do not want to understand, they want to dream.

Who says that we should just present bitcoin as a "magic payment system"? looks great for me. The curious (clever?) one, will find there way to the information.

So in this case 50% of the article is about tech,  a good part speak about a service without going in any usecase. Nothing about, why it's better, what you can do with it that u can't already and how it'll make the world much nicer.

It's not that complicated.  Come on.

Honestly, I had to read Satoshi's paper several times to understand it.  So yeah, in a sense, it is complicated.  But there are lots of things even more complicated than that in life, and people deal with.  The example of driving a car mentioned above is an good one.

Here is an other:  bicycles.  When bicycle were invented, lots of people were bashing the idea and say that it could never be useful because it was too hard to drive, it required too much physical strength and so on.  It was too complicated.

Think about it, if it were easy to understand it would likely mean it fits the paradigms and with it the functionality people are already used to, like paypal, or email type security.. so it's a good thing that Bitcoin is more complicated than that because it means it has features that make it orders of magnitude better than all the current similar solutions.

And it being complicated isn't really a problem.. Driving a car is complicated and yet people manage to learn to drive. So I think that instead of worrying about the complexity of Bitcoin, which we actually want because it means positive things, we should worry about how to teach these complexities to as many people in the best possible way not get rid of them.

That's all.

Why we don't want bitcoin to be easy to understand?

Hum nice didn't saw it
i guess this thread can be removed or fusionate with the other one


Added the translation , see original post...

And neither do we want it to be.

Guys face it, bitcoin is not easy to understand.

this is not so true, the online version is followed by a very wide range of People much more than the paper version.
Then it's hard to get the message passing but i guess the Wordpress announcement translated in french would be a better article as it answer to the most important question: why bitcoin is better than paypal? And for french, Why is it better to NOT rely on americans for online payment?  (could give a link to mtgox and a few site where to pay with btc)
then eventually we can start to speak about why it's secure/how it works but this is not so intresting at first.
Wiki doesn't have to go in "political arguments", so i think the guy who wrote the article just failed in his mission.
 But still, bitcoin in lemonde.fr!

I ll try the translation, but my english is rather bad so don't expect too much.

I tried very hard to make the Wikipedia article intelligible.  But at some point, I'm not sure it is worth the effort to do more.

Lemonde.fr is the electronic version of a journal that has been one of the main daily paper since 1944.  That's old.  People who read this on the internet age are seriously narrow-minded.

then, please be super smart to let not-that-smart peole understood. that is what we habe been trying.

Comments on this article are quite surprising.

Basically they all complain that the article is too difficult to understand.  Then they say they went to the french Wikipedia and still they did not understand.

Since I am the main author of the french Wikipedia article, I don't think this article is difficult to understand.  Rather, I suspect that people who read "lemonde.fr" are just not very smart.

Any translation from moonspeak?