The British writer Joan Rowling, author of the much-loved series of seven Harry Potter novels, tweeted that she did not understand what bitcoin was and asked to explain it to her.

On May 15, CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen posted a half-joking tweet saying that she would “die from happiness” if Joanne Rowling ever pinged her. In response, Joanne Rowling wrote: “I don’t understand bitcoin. Please explain it to me."

In response to this tweet of the world-famous author who has made billions from books about Harry Potter, the bitcoin community showered their explanations on Rowling trying to offer the best words about how the cryptocurrency works. Among those who commented on Rowling's tweet was the founder of the Ethereum ecosystem, Vitalik Buterin, who called bitcoin “digital currency,” which is not backed by anything but has value like a collectible.

"There is a network of computers (which anyone can join) that maintains a decentralized global excel spreadsheet of how many coins each person has."

He added that bitcoin does not have a central authority that controlled the entire network, so "there's no single group of people that can just go and issue more units to their friends or manipulate its rules for political reasons."

The popular twitter account @bitcoin noted that wizards need to store their savings in the Gringotts bank, which was robbed in the first novel about Harry Potter (“Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone”), and bitcoin is able to save wizards from trusting this bank.

Even got Elon Musk joined the thread. He noted that bitcoin looks quite “solid” in comparison with the currencies issued by central banks. He also added that he now owns 0.25 BTC.

Rowling answered some explanations by saying that she wouldn’t want to program money, since it’s difficult for her to even set up a TV, and discussions about blockchains and tokenomics make her brain “just take a walk”. One of the explanations that she liked was the words that bitcoin is something that “exists which doesn't actually exist”.