What is Bitcoin?: Describing Bitcoin in 2 sentences or less
Answering this question is a lot like answering the “What do you do for a living?” question if you work in esoteric industry. Ideally, you’d know the knowledge and experiences of the person that you’re speaking with, but most often times, you don’t have a clue. So, you may ask a series of questions to try and tease out enough information to gain context and provide a response that actually resonates with and makes sense to the other person.
After you have that information, you should distill your response down to a couple of sentences that describe Bitcoin in short and easy to understand language. Here’s my attempt to answer this question for four distinct user groups:
If you’re outside of the financial industry without a software/tech background:
Bitcoin is like email for money. It’s the cheapest, safest, and fastest way to send money to anyone in the world.
If you’re outside of the financial industry with a software/tech background:
Bitcoin is like TCP/IP for money. It’s an open source payment protocol and peer-to-peer network with a distributed, synchronized, immutable database that gives people the ability to send digital money to anyone in the world.
If you’re in the financial industry without a software/tech background:
Bitcoin is like email for money. It’s the cheapest, safest, and fastest way to send money of any amount to anyone in the world without using a bank or money transfer service.
If you’re in the financial industry with a software/tech background:
Bitcoin is like TCP/IP for money. It’s an open source payment protocol and peer-to-peer network with a distributed, synchronized, immutable database that gives people the ability to send digital currency to anyone in the world without using a bank or money transfer service.
Hopefully, this helps you to describe Bitcoin at a basic level to various people with different contextual backgrounds. I was recently told that I bombed on answering this question though, so use at your own risk :).