If anyone wonders why many "regular people" are uncertain about doing anything with cryptocurrencies, look at the top of this article for the reason. It's not that people are incapable of understanding the subject, but that the purveyors of the subject constantly coin new words and meanings.
* Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge,
must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade.
After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon
hitting a specific Total Difficulty value.
* The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain –
11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022.
* The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is
58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022.
* Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. Operators
will shut down on September 6, 2022.
To be fair, I think this is mainly aimed at developers (and ETH ecosystem developers specifically).
While I don't disagree that there's a "vocabulary" problem (e.g. "dank-sharding"), in a perfect world, a normie would largely just interact with an application without needing to know any of this.
Spot on: This underlying infrastructure isn't meant for "regular people", it's meant for the people who directly build atop it. By way of example from TradFi, the news updates from SWIFT about ISO-20022 is similarly laden with jargon:
You say that from the standpoint of readers at this HN blog page, but this blog post is the top blog post and first one seen on https://blog.ethereum.org/. Many people who want to understand what they are looking at prior to purchase would look at this page and quickly close it, never to invest using etherium.
Do you download binary utilities for execution, when every page on the website (or app store) is filled with made-up jargon? That's the issue that I see here.
Ethereum.org is owned by the Ethereum Foundation (hence the EF in the url) which exists to support the ecosystem from a technical and business perspective, not convince users to use Ethereum or invest in it.
Members of the Ethereum Foundation have been critical of Ethereum and called out overzealousness in the past, warning that the price might not be rational.
There's countless examples of niche jargon on the front page of HN every day. Sometimes it has to do with Rust, or Zig, or Protobuf, or an obscure file spec. Today the jargon happens to be about blockchain consensus engineering.
This. The wikipedia page for years seemed (not looking at it again, lol) to be written by people of the same ilk, who introduce a bunch of terminology without explaining what any of it means. When I read the wiki in 2020 it was literally impossible to understand, knowing already at the time how Bitcoin and a few other alt coins worked, as well as someone being into smart contracts well before even Bitcoin was created. And Ethereum is literally just a Bitcoin + smart contracts. There is no other core, fundamental concept to understand in it (until now: PoS). Also yes, as someone who has used hundreds of cryptocurrency products, this applies to basically anything related to cryptocurrency like you said.
One absolutely obnoxious practice is how they all make their own fancy names for millicoins microcoins, etc.
I think that the coinages are mostly reasonable. Finance/accounting have a thick lexicon. So does computer science. So does devops. And those lexicons are all mostly non-overlapping. Granted the crypto lexicon is a lot more playful/childish. Stuff like "HODL" is just shibboleth but that's a minority of the jargon. The stuff that grinds me is when crypto totally redefines a word and doesn't realize it or expects everyone to follow along. "Inflationary" in crypto-speak has only a passing resemblance to the concept by the same name in economics.
