It seems like yesterday when I was cleaning my house on that Friday afternoon in November of 2011 in preparation for the Sabbath day. A podcast of a financial commentator was playing in the background, and he happened to mention something in passing called Bitcoin. The first response to that was to think, "that sounds like the name that would be given to a peer-to-peer system of value exchange, similar to how bit-torrent is a data sharing network." Everything came to an immediate halt as I proceeded to look up Bitcoin online. The first thing that came to my attention was the white paper which explains Bitcoin in nine pages. Upon reading it, I felt like this is the thing I have been looking for much of my life, and didn't know it until it appeared. Part of this was due to the fact that I had spent many years reading books on the economy, the history of money, banking, governments, and other intrigues.
As time went on I would eventually sign up on the Bitcoin talk forum, and learn about the process of mining Bitcoin into existence. Much to my chagrin, the prospect of mining quickly escaped my computer's ability to participate in such a function, and the kind of computing power necessary to compete with other miners was simply beyond my acquisition at the time. Despite this setback, the technology, mathematics, and the disruptive potential behind Bitcoin continued to fascinate me.
Because Bitcoin was created as an open source product, it was quickly replicated with various changes, and rebranded under other names that are commonly referred to as alt-coins. One of these coins that caught my attention is called Peercoin, as it was the first coin that was designed to come into existence through a proof of stake mechanism in contrast to the proof of work mining process of Bitcoin.
One of the drawbacks to the design of Bitcoin is that there is no way for a person to earn yield with it because the inflation only goes to the miners, who do with it as they please, which is often sell it to pay the electric bill to run their computers farms, which can be the size of a wharehouse. Some have tried to fill this niche by playing the middleman, only to end up stealing people's money, such as has been the case on multiple occasions this year alone. A genuine solution for this dilemma was invented by a man named Richard Heart, who is the genius behind HEX: A cryptocurrency that is programmed to inflate, instead of requiring mining, and is distributed to those who have shares of the contract, which are publicly available.
One such shareholder goes by the name of Hexinfo on Twitter. He has taken the entire Bitcoin mining apparatus, and the outstanding wattage of electricity it requires, and has replaced it with an app that is simple enough for a child to use. This app is called Pulse Bitcoin. The name Pulse refers to a blockchain network that is currently being developed by Richard Heart's team. Once this network goes live, everyone will receive free copies of all of the ERC-20 tokens they hold on the Ethereum blockchain as Pulse will be a fork of its entire system state.
Mind you, Pulse Bitcoin is not the same coin as Bitcoin itself, so it doesn't presently have the same value since it is only a few weeks old. This can change rapidly once people start to see just how much of an upgrade Pulse Bitcoin actually is in comparison to Bitcoin itself.
One of the big drawing points of Bitcoin is the fact that the total supply is capped at 21 million coins which are subdivisible to eight decimal places, and that the mining cycles experience a halvening about every four years based on the chain arriving at a certain block. This means that half of the total supply was mined in the first four years, then the rate of mining was cut in half for the next four years, then cut in half again. The next halvening is set to occur in 2024. Because of this, the last Bitcoin are not expected to come into existence until the year 2140.
Pulse Bitcoin will also have a total supply of 21 million coins, and is mined by submitting publicly available digital mining tokens called ASIC (Application Specific Internet Currency) to the Pulse Bitcoin app. These mining tokens will have a fixed supply as of December 20, and become deflationary as they are used. The more ASICs in operation, the sooner the first halvening occurs. This means that half of the entire supply is currently being mined right now, and is expected to continue until the middle of May, 2023!
As much as I still love HEX, there is something about being able to participate in Bitcoin mining, albeit an alternative Bitcoin, that allows me to experience something I wasn't able to do in the past. It's like being able to resurrect Pigpen, and Jerry Garcia so that I could experience the original line up of the Grateful Dead. (~);}