The cryptocurrency ecosystem is an ever-expanding and contracting web of technologies, experiments, scams, games, and communities. Despite the present fog of war in this monetary arena, the innovative spark drawing minds from the world over is simple: nobody (if you know what you’re doing) can touch your extremely volatile form of money except you.

The protective moat surrounding properly coded cryptocurrencies is the same technology that secures millions of websites. Your browser connection with your bank is cryptographically secure. So is your Facebook login. Why? Because we require cryptography to guarantee that the messages we send or the balances we keep on a ledger at a bank are true. Verifiably true.

Cryptocurrencies achieve verifiable proof of ownership in a decentralized fashion. Jamie Dimon doesn’t get to say how much money you have outside of Chase. A distributed network of computers does that for you, and you can run your own computer (a node) in that network and make sure they’re telling the truth, too.

By this point, people are usually lost. They don’t get it, or they don’t care. But some people see there’s money to be made in this new technology, so they invent schemes to suck capital out of venture firms and bleed retail investors dry. That’s the perception, at least. A minority of technologically driven, ethical startups are pioneering a new form of the internet. But their image is tainted by opportunists and outright scammers.

That’s why I claim nobody understands cryptocurrencies. The “industry,” if we have to call it that, has all but guaranteed this confusion.

One set of people come close to understanding. People who are unbanked and want to transfer value instantly across borders. People who require total anonymity to purchase certain forbidden plants online. It’s at the edges of society that we find people who understand cryptocurrencies most, without having to know much (or anything) about the technology.

The reason that’s true might be simple and downright archetypal: they had to suffer in some way to gain that valuable insight. Perhaps everyone else must suffer in some way, too.