fiat is football, chess is soccer

[edit] crap i'm tired, i meant that bitcoin is chess

here's how i explain bitcoin to normies, this seems to be the best way i've discovered. I deliver these concepts using the socratic method, sorta like this:

Me: 'why do you need referees in football or basketball?'

Them: 'because they need to make judgement calls'

Me: 'but can the refs be biased ever?'

Them: (grumbling, sometimes if i'm lucky, conspiracy theories about the league deciding the final game for revenue purposes)

Me: 'how come there are no referees in chess?"

Them: (sometimes i have to fill in the blanks) because it's always obvious when people are following the rules in chess

Me: do you think it's better for money to work like footballl, or chess?

at this point their pupils begin to dialate, and i turn into broadcast mode

Me: Bitcoin is money that works like chess; fiat money works more like football. Instead of moving a piece from here to there, people move coins from this address to that address. So imagine bitcoin as a bunch of people playing chess online, except they are moving coins instead of pieces. But how do people agree on what the correct state of the chess board is? What this genius satoshi nakamoto figured out was, we don't actually have to change the board. We can just make a copy of the board, and stack the new one on top of the old one.

That's what 'proof of work' is doing - they are making a copy of the board at every turn, so anyone can go back and see how the last turns played out. My phone (at this point i hold my phone up) can process all of the bitcoin transactions; that's by design. What miners are doing isn't processing transactions but securing the network. All you have to do to make sure you're seeing the right board is look for the tallest tower. Each layer of the tower takes work to build, and that's what makes it possible for people to quickly figure out what the right board is.

What other coins are trying to do is use pieces on the board to determine which state of the board is correct you. You can see how this goes eventually; whoever has the most pieces gets to tell everyone else how the board words.

Seems to work pretty well for me. Would love to hear what approaches you've found that work.