WTF is Bitcoin?! The Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Guide for Dinner Parties

Trained as an economist, Maxim Beatty approaches the subject from an aggregate demand Keynesian perspective. He's also a battle-hardened entrepreneur and investor, having founded then managed a successful video marketing agency in Shanghai, China for almost a decade, and been COO for a large ecommerce conglomerate in South East Asia. His real world experiences have fuelled many of his laissez-faire ideas in economics regarding international trade, labour markets and regulation.

Maxim first encountered blockchain technology in 2013, and stared writing on the subject for business publications. He was one of the organisers of the Shanghai Bitcoin Meetup and...

What does the near and long term future hold for cryptocurrency and blockchain? Have we opened a Pandora's Box from which there is no return? Or is the future brighter in the absence of the government control that facilitates their monopoly on violence?

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Okay, you now know all the theory and the history of cryptocurrency. How do you go about acquiring it? What should you NOT do? Here are all the nuts and bolts about buying, selling, exchanges and storage.. everything else you'll need to become the cryptocurrency expert.

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Although it may result in a Utopia for some gun-toting libertarians, it is important for everyone to recognise the challenges for society and law enforcement that cryptocurrencies and blockchains pose by facilitating unregulated gambling, prediction markets, bribery, illicit finance, and unregulatable social media. We are entering a Brave New World.

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How can blockchains be used in data management? Credential verification, intellectual property management, decentralised data storage and many other areas could all be impacted by the adoption of blockchain data structures.

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How can businesses use blockchains? Pharmaceuticals, supply chain management, stockmarkets, and real world asset tokenisation are just some of the areas that could benefit from the use of blockchains. Countless projects are already under development or in use.

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How can blockchain technology improve governments? Blockchains can be leveraged to improve the functioning of governmental organisations by increasing transparency and accountability, and decreasing corruption. Adoption of the technology may also lead to revolutionary changes in identity verification, decentralised voting, carbon credit trading and land registry.

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What was Silk Road? What happened to Mt. Gox? Why did the FBI shut down the BTC-E exchange? Was BitConnect a Ponzi scheme? There has been no shortage of controversies associated with cryptocurrency in its short history, however they have also spurred improvements and played a part in promoting the evolutionary success and popularity that the technology experiences today.

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What are stablecoins? How do stablecoins work? What is their purpose? Combining the instant, global portability of cryptocurrencies with the relative predictability of fiat currencies, this innovative technology is so popular, it's utilised by several of the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap.

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What is blockchain securitisation? Beyond purely digital assets, blockchains can also be used to represent real world assets like securities. However, while these new tokenisation innovations will create new highly liquid markets for real estate, stocks and startups, they have also uncovered a legal minefield and practical concerns that need to be addressed when bridging the real world to digital world divide. Government regulation also has to be determined as the world floods with some legitimate and many illegitimate ICO projects that will drive the future online economy.

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Friedrich Hayek theorised about the idea of creating competing currencies in order to facilitate the evolution of more sound money. After Bitcoin, alternative coins, "altcoins" have been launched, each with different tweaks and eccentricities that differentiate them from other cryptocurrencies. It is not yet certain which cryptocurrency will dominate and survive, so much like Excite vs. Google or MySpace vs. Facebook, the field is still open for innovation. But how do you differentiate genuine projects from scams?  

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Cryptocurrency has legions of fans in the libertarian community, who admire its ability to circumvent government's traditional, regulatory control of financial markets and transactions. This has far-reaching consequences for government tax departments, who must adapt now that the blockchain genie is out of the bottle. It also has the potential to clean up corruption, as it facilitates a more transparent view of governmental finances. How do we adapt to this brave new world?

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In early 2015 at a cryptocurrency Meetup at a local Starbucks in Manila, the Philippines, a bedraggled, moped-riding Englishman tried to convince me that the blockchain project he and his online friends were working on was the next evolution of Bitcoin that would completely revolutionise and decentralise all asset markets, from shares to real estate, in the future.. A distributed blockchain smart contract computer, that I could buy into for 30 cents a coin if I was interested. That project, Ethereum, is now worth more than $500 trillion and forms the backbone of the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) economy! In blockchain, don't judge...

Since its early days as a mere curiosity, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have attracted a colourful collection of personalities enthusiastically championing the technology and promoting it to the wider world, as well as passionately arguing amongst themselves regarding its future. To begin with, the legal status of cryptocurrency was also uncertain meaning that some even naively ended up in prison after overstepping existing financial regulations.

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In 2017, Bitcoin's popularity had become a problem. Effectively unable to process more than 400,000 transactions per day (Visa claims to process 150 million transactions per day), how to scale the technology became a bone of contention, that would eventually split the community and lead to the code fork that resulted in the creation of Bitcoin Cash. Find out the technical limitations of the technology and the pros and cons of the respective cryptocurrency scaling strategies.

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Why is cryptocurrency valuable? What is driving the stratospheric valuations? Could cryptocurrency really be a Pandora's Box that recalibrates the global economy for better or worse? We also dive into the fundamental qualities that makes blockchain technology a completely new paradigm.

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The genius of Bitcoin is how Satoshi Nakamoto managed to put together the different technological pieces of the puzzle to create a truly decentralised currency. This episode we cover the intricacies of Proof of Work, what mining actually is (as opposed to how the media describes it), and we look into how a transaction actually works. It's one of the more jargon-heavy chapters (including some long numbers that you can skip forward through lol - bare with me.. I promise there is method to my madness), so don't be afraid to pause and replay if you fall behind.

This episode, we delve into the technological breakthroughs that had to happen in order for Bitcoin to be invented.

Apologies for the absurdly long numbers read out, but it is even in the audiobook version, it is necessary to comprehend the magnitude of the number space the Bitcoin code utilises as it influences that security of the private key system. Note, the alphanumeric hex 58 format private key mentioned in the chapter is: 5KPNAazE2GdkCBqDFKk2S2z2ku94ZvUy67yJXPN2A6DLfZgstVh which converted to a decimal becomes: 93,541,061,888,926,601,153,304,018,818,724,990,844,048,985,859,940,779,646,536,561,528,000,476,090,772.

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Understanding the functions and history of money forms the foundation for understanding cryptocurrency. This episode looks at the economic fundamentals that that led to the creation of blockchain currencies.

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