Joanne Rowling, the author of the series of books about Harry Potter, asked for an explanation of one question "what is Bitcoin" because she could not understand anything.
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Elon Musk (head of SpaceX and Tesla), Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum, the second most popular cryptocurrency), along with other users began to explain to her using memes and all kinds of references to Harry Potter.
Vitalik Buterin tried to explain, comparing Bitcoin with collectibles:
It's a digital currency. There's ~18m units of it. It's not backed by anything, it's just valuable because it is, like collectibles.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 15, 2020
There's a network of computers (which anyone can join) that maintains a decentralized global excel spreadsheet of how many coins each person has.
The Bitcoin page made a reference to Harry Potter: “Wizards still need to trust Gringotts Bank. Bitcoin fixes this.” To which, “offended” Rowling replied that she doesn't trust that.
Elon Musk noted that Bitcoin seems more reliable than regular money. But noted that he still has only 0.25 Bitcoins.
Thus, more than 3,000 Twitter users could not explain to the famous writer what is Bitcoin.
“Imagine that there is something that does not really exist. This is Bitcoin.” This is the only answer that the famous writer understood.
In general, no arguments convinced Rowling of the capabilities or reliability of the first cryptocurrency.
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People are now explaining Bitcoin to me, and honestly, it’s blah blah blah collectibles (My Little Pony?) blah blah blah computers (got one of those) blah blah blah crypto (sounds creepy) blah blah blah understand the risk (I don’t, though.)
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 15, 2020