Cryptocurrencies Are Tied to Nothing — That Doesn’t Mean They’re Worth Nothing

By Patrick Tan on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

When Jeremy Scott, then a 16-year-old student at Pomona High School in Colorado, tried to explain to his parents about the tremendous investment potential of a digital currency called Bitcoin in 2012, his father, a chartered accountant said with a deadpan expression,

“It’s backed by nothing and will come to nothing.”

But Scott junior, an avid CS:Go player (the massively popular multiplayer online game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) and self-professed computer nerd immediately saw the value in Bitcoin.

Scott had already been doing a brisk business, selling “skins” — customized digital renderings of weapons and outfits for CS:Go — and plowing the money he made back into his computer to improve its hardware.

And it was that investment in hardware that allowed Scott to start “mining” Bitcoin on his gaming rig’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).

“Now for my next trick, I’ll need a volunteer with some money.”

What started out as a hobby, soon became an obsession, as Scott experimented with overclocking his GPU, improving the…