A Noob's Guide to Blockchain, Bitcoin, and Cryptocurrency - My Story Part 1

"We missed our chance to invest in the 1990s, we missed the dot-com bubble, we missed the housing bubble - I don't think we are too late to get in on this. What we do in the next few months will determine whether our kids someday think we are brilliant or idiots. I'm diving into this." We both have daughters under eight-years-old. He chose not to invest in this stuff and I've gone nuts over it. We'll see eventually whether either of us made a mistake or whether it was, in fact, too late to get in.

Bitcoin was born during the last economic crisis when someone (or a group of someones) saw the need for a break from trusting government and financial institutions to take care of the needs of people. Blockchain (the technology bitcoin is built on) works like this - a group of unrelated individuals (miners) use complex math to encode (crypto) multiple transactions into a permanent ledger which cannot be changed or altered and is not owned or operated by any individual entities. Blockchain is built to eliminate the need for trust. For example in regular finance: I write a check to you. You take the check to the bank. The bank takes my money and puts it in your account. We have to trust each other and we have to trust the bank - the middle man, the intermediary. Blockchain takes the bank out of the picture and makes our transaction a permanent part of the record. There is no need for trust - it is trustless. It eliminates the need for banks as well. Bitcoin is the currency built on top of that chain of transaction blocks (get it? Blocks of transactions in a chain where each transaction is necessary to validate every other transaction - a blockchain).

Litecoin (LTC) is a cryptocurrency started by Charlie Lee. It was a sort of clone of bitcoin with some improvements to make it faster and cheaper to conduct transactions. Lee said it was silver to bitcoin's gold. It was a lot cheaper than bitcoin and I liked that I could own whole ones instead of just 7/100ths.

Ethereum (ETH) is a newer blockchain based computing platform developed by Vitalik Buterin which allowed for scripting on the network (i.e. computing and building applications aka smart contracts). It too was faster and cheaper to have transactions in than BTC.

This isn't just about creating a new money or getting around banks. This was about building a new internet and creating a new way to share information, finance, and everything else.

Captain Vapoor (that's me) publishes some compelling and sometimes downright weird shit. If you dig it - please
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If you want to buy or sell cryptocurrency you will need a couple of accounts:
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And for trading stocks on your iPhone (and soon Crypto):
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