Who actually understands Bitcoin? It’s a notoriously confusing topic and gets even more confusing once you start hearing about other blockchain projects. Yet, more and more, people can’t stop talking about them.
Over the next couple of weeks, I will be breaking down these technologies to their fundamentals so that you can be a person who not only understands Bitcoin as it is today but also what it may become in the future.
Cryptocurrencies: Everything you don’t understand about money, combined with everything you don’t understand about computers.”
John Oliver, Last Week Tonight
When Bitcoin first came on my radar in 2010, I was in college studying ways businesses could use cutting-edge technology to grow.
The price of 1 Bitcoin was $0.09. I purchased 10,000 Bitcoin with my leftover High School graduation money and patiently waited for the price to go up so I could retire by 30.
Ha, I wish.
Honestly, I had no idea what I was looking at. All I could grasp was that Bitcoin is “magic internet money.”
Over the following years, I stumbled across countless technical explanations of what Bitcoin was but never an explanation of what Bitcoin does.
Bitcoin only started to make sense once I focused on the ancient problem Bitcoin claims to solve: money. Turns out, the more I learned about money, the more everything clicked.
In this newsletter, I’ll break “money” down to its fundamentals and explain why so many people find Bitcoin valuable. When we’re done with that, we’ll look at other blockchain projects to peek into what’s next for the internet.