Unless you’ve been hiding underneath a rock, news of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum or Litecoin are hitting the general news and not just financial news. Today begins our news, editorial and review on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
I trade and hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but as a journalist keep my eyes open to hear both sides of the story. Yes I have heard about Bitcoin for years and thought of it more as a financial term and periodically checked in to see if it was just a passing trend. It’s not, it’s here to stay.
Bitcoin was the first of the cryptocurrencies and remains at the forefront of cryptocurrencies. It is the cryptocurrency which typically receives the greatest amount of headlines and retains the largest amount of agreements by companies.
Bitcoin was the brainchild of Satoshi Nakamoto who created a White Paper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System” and was posted to a cryptography mailing list in November 2008. It was a peer-to-peer exchange system of digital currency distributed over a network of computers outside of the mainstream banking system. In January 2009, the first Bitcoins were mined by Satoshi Nakamoto in what is called the genesis block. Satoshi to this day is a mystery.
Since the technology behind Bitcoin was open sourced, other cryptocurrencies began to evolve such as Litecoin by Charlie Lee and later Ethereum by Vitalik Buterin. Litecoin is technically similar to Bitcoin and was designed to have a cost of zero payments and operate four times faster than Bitcoin. Etherum focused on smart contracts and has been adopted by corporations in developing their own systems such as Microsoft’s Coco Framework in their own private blockchain.
When you follow the news about cryptocurrencies there seem to be two camps, the Bitcoin faithful and the Bitcoin naysayers. The Bitcoin faithful will tell you with each dip in price that it’s time to buy and to hold long. The Bitcoin naysayers keep saying it’s a bubble and refer to the tulip bubble of the 1637 where some tulip bulbs were 10 times the annual pay of a skilled craftsman. No matter which group you relate to more, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are here to stay and are banks.
If you want to know more about Bitcoin watch the documentary “Banking on Bitcoin” by Christopher Cannucciari. It’s available on Netflix and on Youtube.
My first purchase of bitcoin was June 30th when the price was at US dollar $2486 for 1 Bitcoin, as of this writing on November 6 it is now US dollar $7300.
If you’re searching for me, look for Bitcoin Confucius.