Evil, a mirage and perhaps one of the world's most important developments

"Bitcoin is Evil."

Paul Krugman

“Stay away from it. It’s a mirage, basically.”

Warren Buffett

“Bitcoin is a technological tour de force.”

Bill Gates

Learn about Bitcoin

Bubble or not, Bitcoin's meteoric rise and cultural influence commands attention. We should all learn more, whatever we think about it.

If you are not a techy this can be intimidating - there is heaps to grasp; blockchain, wallets, hashing, mining, folks, nonces, altcoins, accumulated difficulty etc..

I'm pretty new to Cryptocurrency and I’m just starting out on my journey to learn more about it. I’ll blog as I go and you can share in my successes while avoiding my mistakes!

The How

To learn, I'm going to dive right in and use it (I’ve never been one to read an instruction manual). That’s why my steemit user name is InTheArena (after Teddy Roosevelt’s inspiring quote).

I'll also write about cryptocurrency (high level) from its very beginnings - I find that's a great way to learn about a complex technology. As a kid I was fairly good at using and assembling computers, but I only began to understand them properly when I learnt about their history; seeing the first computers punching holes in paper or turning lightbulbs on and off helped me understand the power of binary code and the ways it can be represented (transistors) and transmitted (from the noises in the dial up modem to the pulses of light firing down a fiber cable).

The Scene

Try to remember where you were back in September 2008. The world’s financial system was literally collapsing. To everyone’s shock, the fourth largest investment bank in the world (Lehman Brothers) had filed for bankruptcy and no one knew which bank would be next.

Few people had noticed that Bitcoin.org was registered a month before. The website’s White Paper, released in November 2008 by an anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, concisely laid out the framework for a currency which provided “a system of electronic transactions without relying on trust”.

There couldn't have been a better time to sow the seed for a financial payment revolution. To its early adopters it offered a solution that the world desperately needed. It was exciting and relevant. To these guys, Bitcoin was not an investment - like an out of the money option, to them it was a community that shared a vision and that was committed to its success.

The community lived and thrived on a chat forum. You can see the negotiations of the first transactions on bitcointalk, including the notable transaction of 10,000 BTC to buy two pizzas. If the penny hasn't dropped yet, 10,000 BTC is now worth USD75 million!

That's one of the many things that make this space interesting - as digital currency the history is there for all to see. From the original whitepaper, Satoshi's bitcointalk forum profile and the first transaction.

Next Up

Check out my next post Mining Hashes and Nonces - the evolution of cryptocurrency and please upvote if you like the post... it helps my motivation 😊