“What is cryptocurrency?”
“Do you really understand it?”
One of our neighbours、”T” asked me the question the other day, and it was the second time for me to be asked by him exactly the same question if I remember correctly. — His understanding of crypto didn’t seem to have made much progress in those weeks.
Asking big questions, or sometimes philosophic questions, is T’s style, and after I start trying to explain what is Bitcoin, collecting my limited knowledge, he never lets me finish my explanation, which is also his style.
Canada, where I live, is one of the most popular places in the world for mining Bitcoin apparently, but it doesn’t mean that everybody here understands what Bitcoin is.
I am not an expert in cryptocurrency. Still, I am interested in it and I like talking and learning about it. So, I put some links on this post which were useful for me to understand what were blockchains and cryptocurrency, just in case he asks me for the third time.
A podcast as a beginners guide to cryptocurrency
I first got interested in blockchains and cryptocurrency in 2017, which was not very early.
I tried to learn about it online, but the articles about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin in Japanese at that time were crap. Japanese writers who were writing about crypto, in that period at least, were only focused on it as an investment or making money through it. They were interested in Bitcoin as a new style of gambling.
I had to go to the English sites to learn deeper about it, and I found a podcast Crypto 101, and also a YouTube video by Isaac Arthur.
The Video for understanding cryptocurrency
Isaac Arthur said that he is not a specialist on cryptocurrency, but the video was beautifully made and it is so easy to understand for beginners. When I watched it for the first time, I felt as if I was having a lecture at a college.
At the same time, I learned lots of new words in English related to currencies such as “fiat currency” or “commodity”, which I had never used in my everyday conversation in English. The video may be a bit tough for non-native speakers of English.
A “perfect scam” with cryptocurrency
Recently, I have listened to an interesting podcast, “The Missing Cryptoqueen” released by the BBC. The story is about a “perfect scam” with Dr Ruja’s “One Coin”.
— We want to believe that technology can make our life better, but utopia still seems to be far away from us.
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