Bitcoin and Coffee (thoughts from 2014)

While going through my blog posts on Medium I found this one from 2014. I like when past me is right, although I was big time wrong about saying “it took me two years to understand Bitcoin”, that’s obviously a bias from the Danning-Kruger effects, the truth is that I didn’t understand it back than and I still don’t fully understand it today, and anyone who tells you “I’m a Bitcoin expert” you should raise your brow and ask, which area of Bitcoin are you an expert in and for how long have you worked in it?

Yesterday (Set 2014) my friends and I met for coffee and beers at Berkli Parc, a cozy coffee lounge in the Lower East Side. We start talking about the North Korea hacking Sony and “The Interview”, which by the way was hilarious:

Haters gonna hate, aint’ers gonna ain’t

After discussing about gossipy low key stuff we jump into payment system and Point of Sale and spoke about Apple Pay and Credit Cards Systems, and because one of us implemented the code of a POS working in a company that did fraud detection, the discussion was on fire. At one point I asked what do you guys think about Bitcoin and the answer was very clear:

Nobody understands Bitcoin.

So here I am talking about Bitcoin: it took me two years to finally understand a little bit of Bitcoin, but I’m sure nobody fully understand it yet, and that’s because like when the Internet was born, nobody knew that there could have been.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin (blockchain) is a technology and bitcoin is an application of it. The economic aspect of Bitcoin is very interesting.

Someone think of Bitcoin as a currency others as an asset (or as a commodity), and they’re both wrong, Bitcoin is a completely new concept.

You can buy a pizza for 10,000 BTC($72,000,000 today), you can exchange bitcoins for USDs and that’s the Bitcoin Currency aspect. Bitcoin is also compared to Gold because is scarce, is limited and because is mined at a pace similar to how Gold is mined, hence Bitcoin is also considered a Digital Asset. Because it’s code is open source and because it runs on Internet there are other applications to it such as the Smart Contracts, the Alternative Currencies and the Side Chains and who knows what will be the “Uber” application of the future.

If you enjoyed this article you can tip me with changetip.com (@feulf), for each beer I’ll Tweet a picture of me drinking the beer with your twitter name next to it.

I also like to follow the Bitcoin Rule of Honor:

Help your friends to create their first Bitcoin Wallet and donate them 1 Satoshi (0.00000001 BTC)

So if you’re new to Bitcoin contact me and I’ll be happy to help you to get your first Bitcoin Wallet and your first 0.0000001 Bitcoin*.

*Lol, in 2014 Bitcoin was somewhere around $700, today is close to $10,000 one satoshi is 20 times more valuable. I’m expecting in 5 years to see another 20 folds up, am I crazy?