Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by miscellaneous 3699 days ago
> The community that already understands it isn't doing a very good job making it so that others can reach it

Where I disagree is that I don't believe that all ideas/concepts can be made "easy to understand" to a general audience. Many concepts - especially those technical in nature - simply require a large amount of background knowledge to understand.

You can be the best mathematics teacher in the world, but you won't be able to (and no one expects you to) make the Riemann hypothesis widely understood to the general public. It's just not feasible. And I posit that Bitcoin (whilst maybe not as technical as the Riemann hypothesis) similarly requires a large amount of background knowledge and is not an "easy" concept to understand in 30 minutes.

The good news is that there are millions of things that people use every day that they don't understand - cars, computers, TVs - in fact, due to the specialization of knowledge, most things people encounter they do not fully understand. I don't think this is a big deal.