My Bitcoin Story
Where do I begin? …
Like everyone else, I have my unique Bitcoin story and I’d like to share it with you here.
Digital money? Thats dumb, I have my digital money in my <insert bank name here> mobile app.
I was first introduced to the name-drop of “Bitcoin” back in 2015. Yes 2015 and I didn’t buy back then when the low was 171.51* and a high of 314.39*. :rip:
Jumping a few years ahead to 2017, when the market was booming and busting I was confident that it would fail and the market crashing proved me right, or so I thought! The 2017 BTC high was booming at $19,716* and a few months later in February of 2018 it was busting at price of $6,756*. Surely this meant the end of all cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin as well? As writing this article today, I can assure you it did not end in 2017 … at least not in this reality.
Spoiler alert: BTC has had an all-time high of $68,789 as of this writing.
Initially I did not dig into how bitcoin, the token, could have value and why it could not be duplicated in a digital sense. I figured it was closer to an NFT type value-proposition where the hash or pixels can be copied by anyone online, but that is just not the case. The double spend attack was the second thought I had on how the bitcoin had no intrinsic value. The consensus model in Bitcoin is fascinating and worth a deeper dive.
To make a long story short, I finally started to take Bitcoin serious in 2020 when my bank prevented me from making a transaction and articles online basically said that the bank wanted to protect its customers from losing money. Why would anyone need protection from spending their money? Oh yeah, its not really your money if it’s in the bank, it’s theirs! Growing up in the United States of America, I was financially privileged and I was given a rude awakening call to how “money” works around the world. An amazing article was written by Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation, on Check your Financial Privilege* that I highly recommend reading to gain a new perspective.
Given my background and education in Computer Science, I gravitated towards the technological solution Bitcoin solved and how it was thorough in its initial offering of a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash with no central organization, or counter-parties. Of course Bitcoin was not the first attempt at electronic cash, but it was the first to succeed in a true way.
Short and sweet blog today, we hope you enjoyed this BIPs Blog post. Reach out, we want to hear from you!
*References: