Google Docs But Angry: What a 12-Year-Old Taught Me About Explaining Crypto

My 12-year-old niece asked me about Dogecoin yesterday.

"Did Elon Musk create it?" she asked.

Here we go, I thought. Time to explain cryptocurrency to a middle schooler.

"No, it started as a joke. Like a meme about money."

She looked confused. "So people buy joke money?"

"Well, yes. It's worth real money now. Billions actually."

"But why would anyone want fake internet money?"

Fair question, kid. Fair question.

When Technical Explanations Fail

I did what any self-respecting tech professional would do: I launched into full explainer mode.

I explained cryptocurrency. Decentralized ledgers. Peer-to-peer transactions. Mining. Blockchain verification. Consensus mechanisms. Cryptographic hashing. The whole nine yards.

Her eyes glazed over like I was reading tax code. Actually, scratch that—tax code might have been more engaging.

I've given this explanation hundreds of times. To executives. To investors. To board members. I've refined it. Practiced it. Added slides and diagrams and flowcharts.

And here I was, losing a 12-year-old in the first thirty seconds.

So I pivoted.

"Okay, forget all that. Imagine Google Docs, but for money."

She perked up. Finally, something she understood.

"So everyone can edit the money?"

"No, everyone can SEE the money. But only you can move yours."

She frowned. "Why would I want everyone to see my money?"

"You don't. It's anonymous. They see the transactions, not who made them."

The Moment Everything Clicked

She thought for a moment. I could see the wheels turning.

Then she said it:

"So it's like Google Docs but angry?"

I stopped. Processed. Ran it through my mental model of how blockchain actually works.

Everyone can see the document. Nobody trusts anyone else to edit it fairly. Everyone keeps their own copy just in case someone tries to mess with it. And if someone tries to cheat, the whole system rejects them.

Google Docs but angry. With money. And memes.

"Yeah," I said. "That's basically it."

She nodded, satisfied for about three seconds.

"That's stupid. Why not just use Venmo?"

And that's when I realized my 12-year-old niece understood crypto better than most VCs I've pitched.

The Problem With How We Explain Things

Here's the uncomfortable truth: The best explanation isn't the right one. It's the one that sticks.

We've convinced ourselves that complexity equals sophistication. That if we can't explain something in dense technical language, we don't really understand it. We build these elaborate frameworks. Technical documentation that reads like stereo instructions translated through three languages. Whitepapers so dense they could stop bullets.

Meanwhile, a kid with zero context, zero investment in sounding smart, and zero patience for BS nails it in four words.

Google Docs but angry.

That's blockchain. That's the whole thing. It's a collaborative document that nobody trusts each other enough to edit normally, so we created this incredibly complex system of verification and replication because we're all suspicious of each other.

Excel but suspicious.

PowerPoint but paranoid.

Shared spreadsheets for people with trust issues.

Why Simple Explanations Threaten Us

You know what's scary? Admitting that something complex can be explained simply.

Because if it's that simple to explain, maybe it's not as revolutionary as we claimed. Maybe the emperor's clothes are a little thin. Maybe we don't need another whitepaper or framework or consensus mechanism with a Greek mythology name.

I've sat in meetings where we spent forty-five minutes debating how to explain our blockchain solution to clients. We created slide decks. We drafted talking points. We brought in consultants to help us message our messaging.

Nobody said "It's Google Docs but angry."

Because that sounds... underwhelming. It doesn't justify the budget. It doesn't wow the board. It doesn't make us sound like we're on the cutting edge of technological innovation.

It just makes it clear.

And clarity, weirdly, is terrifying.

What My Niece Actually Understood

My niece didn't just create a catchy phrase. She understood something fundamental that most crypto evangelists miss:

The technology exists because of distrust, not in spite of it.

Blockchain isn't elegant. It's not efficient. It's certainly not simple. It's what you build when you want a shared system but you don't trust anyone else in the room. It's the technological equivalent of everyone keeping their own receipt and comparing notes afterward.

It's collaborative technology for people who don't want to collaborate.

When she asked "Why not just use Venmo?" she was asking the question nobody wants to answer: If we trusted institutions, we wouldn't need this.

That's the whole point. That's also the whole problem.

Venmo works because we trust Venmo (and PayPal, and our banks, and the regulatory system). Blockchain works because we don't trust anyone. Pick your poison.

The Real Lesson: Stop Trying to Sound Smart

Next client meeting, I'm bringing my niece. She'll probably explain our entire blockchain strategy as "Excel but suspicious."

She's not wrong.

Here's what I learned: When you can't explain something simply, you probably don't understand it as well as you think you do. Or worse, you understand it perfectly fine but you're afraid that if you explain it simply, people will realize it's not as impressive as you made it sound.

The crypto space is full of this. Unnecessarily complex explanations for concepts that are actually pretty straightforward. Not because the concepts require that complexity, but because we've built an entire industry on the assumption that if people really understood what we were building, they'd ask harder questions.

Questions like "Why not just use Venmo?"

We don't need more whitepapers. We don't need more technical frameworks. We don't need another consensus mechanism named after Greek gods or Norse mythology.

We need more 12-year-olds calling it like it is.

Google Docs but angry. That's blockchain.

Everything else is just us trying to make it sound more complicated than it needs to be.

And maybe, just maybe, that tells you everything you need to know about who's actually confused here—and it's not the kids.