You, me and Bitcoin: An introduction to the Blockchain
You, me and Bitcoin: An introduction to the Blockchain
By now you’ve probably heard of bitcoin and the blockchain. You might have heard of how it was bound to become the worlds new currency. With bitcoin`s fix supply of 21 million many compare it to precious metals, touting it as “digital gold”. You might also have heard that bitcoin`s only use is the payment system that the black market, the deep web or cartels use to launder money. Or, maybe it was bitcoins incredible rally to an all-time high of nearly twenty thousand dollars, clocking at precisely $19,783.06.
Myself, like most people, had heard of bitcoin years before it was popular but disregarded it as something that would never have a place in the world. But a single financial ‘asset’ or object (however you choose to categorize it (don`t ask the SEC)) making gains of over 400% in a matter of months is hard to ignore. It was this truly astronomical increase in value that captured the eyes of the world. Myself included.
It was around the next of November 2017 when someone from the physics study group mentioned that his roommate had been mining bitcoin but also slipped in that IOTA was developing some crazy new alteration of blockchain called tangle. At the time IOTA was roughly $.27 dollars and in the next 4 weeks price skyrocket to nearly $5. In the meanwhile, I was spouting off about how awesome blockchain tech was and how it was gonna change the world and cure cancer. I didn`t even know what the blockchain was, but yet here I was shouting off at the top of lungs how awesome this thing was. At one point I can recall myself telling a friend that “this stuff is like printing money”(we will get into this in a later article). How gullible can one be? Well as it turns out, pretty gullible.
It wasn’t until almost a whole year later that I finally came around to researching what I was so heavily interested in. At this point, my life had pretty much been consumed by the crypto craze. So I decided that I should probably check out one of these “white papers” that determines if a coin is a fraud or not. Where better to start than the OG of crypto, Bitcoin. At only 6 pages long Bitcoin`s white paper was short and only contained what was needed for understanding its purpose. No fluff. No bloat. That makes it unintimidating but it didn’t decrease the complexity of Satoshi`s vision.
After spending about 5 hours googling math terms and attempting to understand what he was actually saying, I turned to google like I do for most things.
Below is a video that I really enjoyed and helped decipher what a blockchain is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r43LhSUUGTQ
And if you`re up to it here is the link to Satoshi Nakamoto`s bitcoin white paper.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Aaaand this is where I leave you. We`ll pick up in part two, eventually.
