Why Cryptordinary Exists
I first heard about Bitcoin in November 2017, at my first job. For me, it showed up in the worst possible way, looking back. Our developers were obsessed — “getting rich fast” was basically the only thing they talked about. Sure, Bitcoin had been around since 2009, and blockchain ideas even earlier, but it didn’t reach my ears until almost a decade later. That’s how most technology works for most people: it’s not about when it’s invented, but when and how it enters your life.
After 2019, I lost interest completely. Some friends and I tried to use crypto to fund a Balkans trip while the EUR/TRY rate was going wild. It was confusing to set up accounts, hard to understand trading, and most of the time we were down. When we finally broke even, we cashed out. Maybe we tried again once more. I honestly don’t remember.
Later, at another firm, I ran into crypto terms in a cybersecurity context. To my semi-tech brain, they felt like the most meaningless word strings ever created. Until this year, I had no real desire to understand them. Not until I started reading The Network State and realized that “getting rich fast” was never the real reason Bitcoin and crypto existed.
Even then, I kept running into the same wall. YouTube videos, blog posts, on-demand courses, white papers, academic articles they all leaned on abstract jargon that never clicked. Worse, much of the content seemed built to perform (for clicks, stats, or show) rather than to teach. Finding the truly helpful ones took trial and error, and even then I needed countless analogies and endless questioning—that’s where the idea for the “not-so-frequent FAQ” was born—before I could piece together real understanding. And by analogies and questions, I don’t mean the oversimplified “explain it like I’m five” takes. Those often make things harder because:
1. They ignore that people already carry cumulative knowledge across different topics.
2. They strip away the reasoning process, giving you half-answers instead of letting you form a chain of thought.
I thought those videos, articles, and questioning sessions could help others who are like me. That is how the idea of finding a language to make crypto part of ordinary life began, and that is why Cryptordinary exists.
