Is it time to buy Bitcoin? Has the idea finally come into vogue after nearly seven long years? My YouTube video, “How To Buy Bitcoins: In 3 Minutes” is already up to 18,412 views , which is amazing considering it was shot in about, well, 3 minutes - quite unprofessionally from my garbage fire of a laptop at the time, no less.
Word about Bitcoin and crypto technology seems to be spreading from house to house, Internet user to Internet user, YouTube commenter troll to YouTube commenter troll... like a modern day echo chamber of Paul Reveres spreading the word all at once.
The traditional media certainly hasn’t done Bitcoin many favors - all the scare stories about hacked exchanges and hypothetical security breaches, when the “establishment” financial system continues to fleece the public with quite non-hypothetical fees and absurdly low interest rates.
Yet that may all be changing: USA Network intentionally “leaked” (ah yes, viral marketing in 2016, where corporations leak their own stuff! Edgy!) the first episode of the new season of “Mr. Robot” three days before its scheduled broadcast. The leaked episode reportedly featured a Bitcoin ATM truck or something of the sort, presumably sending a stampede of Mr. Robot fans to the Internet in search of how to buy a Bitcoin or two for real... which might explain the sudden influx in traffic to my awfully recorded 3 minute video about buying bitcoins.
Within the fictional context of the show, of course, the Bitcoin truck probably gets its cameo because the hacker genius protagonist - who hallucinates an alter ego played by Christian Slater or something - had helped crash the global financial system in the prior season... so much like in our non-fictionalized real world, a portion of the population seems to be scrambling for things that do not appear to be cratering in value, such as Bitcoin and gold. Both assets are up in 2016 so far.
Whats bitcoin?
It's a decentralized currency that no one person or organization controls. It creates an alternative monetary, exchange, and value storage system without needing to trust banks or governments. Check out the whitepaper here: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
It also happens to be the technological grandfather of steemit technology: Bitcoin spawns BitShares which spawns Steem. Ok, well I guess you might say it's steemit's great grandfather if you count the first version of BitShares in the heritage.