by Roberto Quaglia – – roberto.info

Today I’d like to spend a few words on a specialistic theme most of the people still know little or nothing about, and which nevertheless in the future will have an important impact on the lives of all of us. You’ve certainly have already heard of Bitcoin. But perhaps, you likely are missing all details.

More than that, you are probably missing the sequels – I’m talking about the other coins which seek to become an alternative to Bitcoin. Of course here we won’t be able to clear all mysteries on this subject, but we can offer you a little panoramic. Bitcoin is an electronic currency which has been created in 2009, and it basically consists in a distributed peer-to-peer database which ideally is shared by everyone who holds any unit of this coin. This ensures that the circulating coins cannot be counterfeit. Also the emission of bitcoin is ruled in a certain way, in a way which is established in advance and is unchangeable, by the way of a process called Proof of Work which consists in the solving of a specific algorithm with variable difficulty. This is a minting process everybody can theoretically take part to, but in the real world it’s now reserved to those who can afford the increasingly expensive dedicated computers and even more than that all the electricity that these machines consume.

When Bitcoin was created, in 2009, it was nothing worth. The first enthusiasts who adopted it where producing thousands of coins every few days and then they had no idea what to do with them. In May 2010 a man called Lazlo offered to pay 10,000 bitcoins to whoever was willing to send him 2 pizzas. It took some time before someone cared to accept his 10,000 bitcoins offer and finally Lazlo succeeded in buying his two nice pizzas. Not too bad, he must have thought, two real, concrete, tasty and eatable pizzas in exchange with a handful of electrons and some weird string of ASCII characters on the screen of his computer. Did Lazlo do a good deal? It depends on how good were those two pizzas in the end. At the exchange rate of a few days ago, May 25, 2017, seven years later those 10,000 bitcoins are today worth more or less 26 million dollars.

Lazlo today can boast about having eaten the most expensive pizzas in the world, which by the way are getting more and more expensive as time goes by. Just in the past few months Bitcoin has doubled once again its value, reaching a max capitalization of 44 billion USD. Continue reading →