About davidsmithmq

CoinMinutes’ Approach to Encouraging Blockchain Curiosity

I just can't seem to get the idea out of my head that educational crypto must have failed miserably after looking through a large number of different pieces of material. In most cases, crypto writers choose one of the two options: Tech experts write a complex and confusing piece full of jargon and investment influencers hype up token prices without explaining how things work. At least from my perspective, neither of these ways gets to the core of the fact that people driven by curiosity want to learn.

Our Educational Philosophy and Approach

I want to admit here - my first tries to educate people about blockchain weren't successful. Throughout 2022, I invested three months in creating a "beginner's guide" which nobody fully read. It was correct, safe, and inefficient.

The change came when I stopped seeing the world through the educator's eyes and looked at it from the learner's perspective. I can still remember very clearly the moment when the concept of blockchain finally clicked for me - it was not while I was reading a whitepaper but rather when I saw a developer showing how the change of a transaction was affecting the whole chain of blocks. That very "aha" moment totally changed my understanding of things.

At CoinMinutes, we want to make that experience not happen by chance but systematically. Instead of giving what knowledge experts think is necessary, we actually take people’s questions as a starting point. This manner of work discovering what I refer to as curiosity loops - the next question always comes from the answer given, therefore, the learner is pulled in and not forced to be given information.

We do escalate awareness step by step, however, it has to be substantially more unstructured than the majority of teachers would assume. Students do not learn in a linear way - they must come back to previous points, skip chapters, and even be uncertain before they finally get it. Our content is setting up these small puzzles that make learning stick.

Learning Paths: Different Approaches for Different People

For Blockchain Beginners

What you are going through if blockchain is new to you is probably the stage where you are bombarded with technical words but you don't understand a thing and you are not confident enough to ask for clarification. A problem discussed in our beginner content is solved by a method called “building up comparisons” - beginning with examples and only then bringing in technical notions.

What has been incredibly surprising is the effectiveness of certain analogies more than others. We devoted a few months to coming up with the analogies that would help users relate blockchain to a physical ledger, but it turned out during user testing that most people grasp the concept much quicker when they are explained that blockchain is like a Google Doc with version history and editing rights.

Visuals are king in our beginner content. Instead of just telling people that a hash function is a way of uniquely identifying data, we developed an interactive tool that not only tells but also shows users how changing a single character in their name results in a totally different hash output - thus demonstrating how data on the blockchain is secured from being altered.

For Crypto Enthusiasts: Beyond Price

It is something which I have never figured out that people would separate "crypto users" from to discussions of a technical nature. From my side, even those who are merely trading in Cryptocurrency would gain from the technology concept as it totally alters the way they do project valuation.

A change in the technical aspect was brought about by us to reflect the market behavior. This has led to users realizing that the prices of tokens can be affected by changes in the protocol. Nevertheless, I will say that we are struggling with making tokenomics more understandable. The parts of game theory deriving from tokenomics which are still very much our challenge to explain.

Technical Deep Dive Example: How Consensus Mechanisms Work

We can not often be seen explaining a very complicated technical topic like consensus mechanisms with misunderstood parts of blockchain, let me give an example.

Indeed, to some extent, it is not only "solving math problems" that proof-of-work is doing as it is generally thought whereas proof-of-stake is not only "putting up collateral". The brilliance of Bitcoin's PoW lies in its single-directionality - hard to do but easy to confirm. This is what makes the system, as termed by computer scientists, a costly one to fake.

Learning Methods and Community Engagement

Content Format Diversity: Finding What Works

One lesson I have learned: people learn differently. As for me, I learn through reading, but most of the members of our community prefer a visual or interactive format.

We use a variety of content to reach out to our community members:

Written explainers (still the main format of our work)

Visual learning tools (very helpful for understanding consensus mechanisms and cryptographic concepts)

Audio interviews (which put a human face on technical topics)

Interactive simulations (our blockchain "sandbox" has been well received)

Even though we tried to keep a balance between these formats, our results showed that different topics had different preferred formats. The engagement of people with the technical topics like sharding and zero-knowledge proofs is three times higher for visual formats than for other formats, while governance topics are more suitable for discussion formats. We have made our changes accordingly.

Find More Information:

Coinminutes Crypto: Real-Time Cryptocurrency Market Data

The Role of Diversity in CoinMinutes Crypto Reporting

The Community Learning Experience

Understanding of blockchain is facilitated if people can discuss the concepts with each other. Our Discord server is one of the greatest educational resources we possess, and it is loaded with more than 6,800 members, who are a mix of beginners and protocol developers.

We have upgraded the community features through:

Discussion threads on developments

Expert interviews and AMAs

This community-based model turns solitary learning into collective exploration, which is in line with the decentralized concept that is the strength of blockchain. However, I am not satisfied with the way we monitor and acknowledge learning progress – that is something we need to work on.

Building Trust by Being Honest About What We Don't Know

At Coinminutes Crypto, being truthful about our shortcomings is basically the way we function. As an instance, when we elaborate on consensus mechanisms, we also point out inefficiency problems and difficulty in implementation. When we discuss governance models, we not only talk about the successes, but also the failures.

Although we have been in this industry for quite some time, I still need to search for the concepts on Google if someone asks me a technical question that I don't know. People who are educating others about blockchain should be like me, humble, and admit that blockchain is very complicated.