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Trump Won’t Kill America, Bitcoin Will

Traders Magazine Online News, March 21, 2019

Brett Cenkus

Misplaced Money

I bought a couple bitcoins in 2013. I bought them through a Bitcoin exchange and I can’t find a record of the transaction now. I’ve searched old emails and note files and can’t recall the name of the exchange. I am concerned it was the now-defunct Mt. Gox, which “lost” 750,000 customer bitcoins in a fraud-hacking-bankruptcy trifecta. So, I don’t know how to locate those bitcoins or whether it’s worth even ultimately discovering where I bought and kept them.

Back then, I paid something like a hundred dollars per bitcoin. With the price of a bitcoin at close to $2,400 as I’m writing this, that’s real money. Real money I can’t find. And, it’s not like they will just turn up one day. I won’t be moving the dryer and stumble across them. For all the talk about the permanency and immutability of bitcoins, you rarely hear talk about how things that only exist virtually have their own way of disappearing. But, they do.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a type of currency, specifically a cryptocurrency (there are many others, one or more of which may ultimately turn out to be far more broadly adopted than Bitcoin?—?this is the early innings), which means it is a digital medium of exchange. Like the U.S. dollar, Bitcoin is both a store of wealth and a means for facilitating trading of services and products. You can use bitcoins to purchase products directly from a store in India. Press a button and BOOM, you can pay for a product or service by transferring bitcoins from your own wallet (of the electronic, not physical, variety) to the recipient’s account. There is no middleman?—?no intermediary to trust?—?just a relatively brief wait for the transfer to be completed and historically low transaction fees.

What makes Bitcoin so interesting, though, is that it’s not backed by a central bank or government. Bitcoins just exist out in the world and people assign them value, a significantly increasing amount of value (BTW, just to keep things confusing, it’s Bitcoin with a capital ‘B’ when you refer to the overarching protocol that is Bitcoin, and bitcoin with a lowercase ‘b’ when you refer to the actual currency).

A Bit About Blockchain Technology

Bitcoin was created by an individual or group of individuals under the pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. It is built on an innovative and disruptive technology called Blockchain. A blockchain is essentially a public, cryptographically-protected, distributed ledger spread across a network of thousands of computers. This “database” contains records of every transaction that ever takes place on it and it is constantly reconciling itself. In this way, it is virtually impossible to corrupt transactions that take place because, if anyone tried to change the record of a transaction, the entire system would be out of balance and immediately identify the inconsistency.

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