I showed some friends how you can use #ecash to take actual USD-denominated value and turn it into a magic string of letters and numbers whose ownership can transfer electronically. I did this with redeemable boardwalkcash tokens.

They weren't impressed.

One of the comments: "I wouldn't know what to do with that 'dollar'.."

Another comment: "I get less excited about a digital thing, like an email or something than, like, owning this glass [picks up a glass]"

Me: "you can't own most digital things in the sense that they can't be copied. With an email or a digital file, you can copy it and share it without losing ownership of it. Now two people have it instead of one. Owning that glass is cool because when you give it to me, I own it and *you don't*. It's scarce and transferrable. This works just like that, but I just instantly *texted you* a valuable thing across physical space and now you own it"

Them: "eh I dunno. Just doesn't feel like anything"

I sort of get the reaction, but also not at all... Even without a use case, it is just intrinsically mind-blowing to me that we can electronically transfer locked energy in a conservative manner.

Interacting with normies makes me question whether I'm just an excited nerd geeking out over a neat toy that doesn't actually matter to anyone, or if I'm an early appreciator of something revolutionary.

Gonna stick with "the latter" for now...