The Miraculous Rise Of Bitcoin
By Dietrich Gvzmann-Sivilotti
Weebly Editor December 19, 2017 Few opportunities in life come to let you make a fortune out of thin air, but when Bitcoin came into the picture, people who spent pennies on Bitcoin became millionaires.
Bitcoin is something called a cryptocurrency, a digital form of money that uses encryptions to transfer money from one entity, be it a person, business, etc., to another. Bitcoin made a massive impact because it was the first decentralized digital currency; something that doesn't require a bank or other middle-man party to make a transaction. Virtually everyone relies on banks for storing their money and making online payments, but Bitcoin and other decentralized digital currencies can remove banks from the transaction which helps to save money, and can also be used to make payments overseas without worrying about using different currencies and without having to convert between them. The creator of Bitcoin is anonymous, but goes under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. They claim to be a Japanese male in his 30s but this hasn't been verified, so it is unknown if the creator was a group a people working under a single name or simply one individual. It is also unknown why it was created, although there is a theory that suggests it was created with contempt for the practice of "fractional-reserve banking," the basic system that is used almost worldwide. The evidence for this is a single line of text that was embedded into the first block of bitcoin, which reads "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." This also supports the theory that the first bitcoin was mined on that day, since it was unlikely to have been made previous and then embedded with text afterwards. Many other cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin and Ethereum have come into existence to compete with Bitcoin, with prices surging for all of them. Meanwhile, while people who bought Bitcoin early on are probably jumping with joy at their newfound wealth, there are those who believe that the high value of Bitcoin is actually proof of its failure; failure as a digital currency, success as an investment. In the end, Bitcoin turned out to be just another investment, watched by the world and by Wall Street especially, not quite the commonplace digital form of payment for everyday life that the creator may have intended it to be. |
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