The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin Page #4

Today I sent

a total of...

2700 bitcoins

to butterfly labs.

I purchased, basically,

a custom-designed

bitcoin-mining

supercomputer.

If bitcoin fails...

Everything I have

is worthless.

( STAMMERS )

The bitcoins I have,

the computers,

the mining system

was all a waste of money.

But if it succeeds, then...

It will have been worth it,

I think.

( BEEPS ) - The bitcoin economy

was a wild west in cyberspace

that was very attractive

to hackers and scammers.

Over the years,

tens of thousands of coins had been stolen

and 2012 proved no different.

Users had to be careful.

If somebody steals your bitcoins,

there are no consumer protections.

Sorry, they're gone.

You lost your bitcoins? They're gone

and you're not going

to get them back.

But after months of stagnation

on the exchanges,

the bitcoin price was

on the rise again.

The price of bitcoin today

is around $7 u.S.D.,

which just had a nice

little bump this week.

By the end of the year,

the blogging site wordpress

announced it would start

accepting bitcoin payments.

And in early 2013,

the discussion forum reddit

also announced

bitcoin support.

They were the first major sites

to incorporate bitcoin,

and these milestones

signaled the beginning

of mainstream acceptance.

Bitcoin is the most subversive

technology on the planet.

This is a system that is growing

around the entire world.

So if it works,

if this experiment continues to grow,

it doesn't just help a few of us

in this state or in the country,

but it actually helps

everyone around the world.

( PEOPLE CHATTERING )

DANIEL:

As the bitcoin price hovered around

it's previous

all-time high of $31,

I visited a libertarian

conference in New Hampshire.

It lost 20% and then it

gained 20%

in 20 minutes.

It is...

they're silly.

DANIEL:

Libertarians are among

the earliest adopters

of bitcoin.

Its nature as a currency

that isn't controlled

by central banks makes it

attractive to this community.

Once I was able to kind

of grok the basic concept,

it was like, "this is

the perfect money."

DANIEL:

This is what a bitcoin address looks like.

Think of this long string

of characters

as an account number where

your bitcoins are stored.

When you send

or receive bitcoins,

they are sent

to these addresses.

The addresses are

long and hard to remember

so using a phone

to scan a q.R. Code

is a fast and easy way

to read them.

Another good thing to know

is that bitcoins

can be broken down

to eight decimal places.

This means that you can send

fractions of a bitcoin.

So any amount of money

can be represented.

With bitcoin,

every transaction is public.

Everyone can see the amount

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