Crypto 101 with Jonathan · Lesson 1 of 8
What is crypto?
Digital money that runs on a public, shared record instead of one bank’s ledger.
In this lesson
- Crypto is a digital asset that can be sent directly between two people without a bank in the middle.
- A public, shared record called the blockchain keeps track of who holds what.
- The point is that no single company controls the ledger, which is both the appeal and the responsibility.
Lesson notes
If you’ve ever wondered what crypto actually is, here is the plainest answer I can give you. Crypto is digital money. You can send it directly to someone else, anywhere in the world, without a bank sitting in the middle of the transaction.
What makes that possible is a public, shared record called a blockchain. Instead of one bank keeping the only copy of the ledger, thousands of computers keep the same copy and check each other’s work. When a transaction happens, they all record it.
So when people say crypto is “decentralized,” that is what they mean: nobody owns the record. That is the appeal for a lot of people. It also means you, or whoever holds the asset for you, carry more of the responsibility for keeping it safe.
In the video I also walk through the three pieces people mix up (the crypto itself, the network it runs on and the wallet that holds it) and why “crypto” is a word like “vehicles”: a bicycle and a freight train are both vehicles, but not for the same trip. In the next lesson we look at the first and best-known crypto asset: Bitcoin.