Bitcoin worth graphic novel
This is commonly referred to as a chargeback. Bitcoin payments are easier to make than debit or credit card purchases, and can be received without a merchant account. Payments are made from a wallet application, either on your computer or smartphone, by entering the recipient's address, the payment amount, and pressing send. To make it easier to enter a recipient's address, many wallets can obtain the address by scanning a QR code or touching two phones together with NFC technology.
Much of the trust in Bitcoin comes from the fact that it requires no trust at all. Bitcoin is fully open-source and decentralized. This means that anyone has access to the entire source code at any time. Any developer in the world can therefore verify exactly how Bitcoin works. All transactions and bitcoins issued into existence can be transparently consulted in real-time by anyone.
All payments can be made without reliance on a third party and the whole system is protected by heavily peer-reviewed cryptographic algorithms like those used for online banking.
No organization or individual can control Bitcoin, and the network remains secure even if not all of its users can be trusted. You should never expect to get rich with Bitcoin or any emerging technology.
It is always important to be wary of anything that sounds too good to be true or disobeys basic economic rules.
Bitcoin is a growing space of innovation and there are business opportunities that also include risks. There is no guarantee that Bitcoin will continue to grow even though it has developed at a very fast rate so far. Investing time and resources on anything related to Bitcoin requires entrepreneurship. There are various ways to make money with Bitcoin such as mining, speculation or running new businesses.
All of these methods are competitive and there is no guarantee of profit. It is up to each individual to make a proper evaluation of the costs and the risks involved in any such project.
Bitcoin is as virtual as the credit cards and online banking networks people use everyday. Bitcoin can be used to pay online and in physical stores just like any other form of money. Bitcoins can also be exchanged in physical form such as the Denarium coins , but paying with a mobile phone usually remains more convenient. Bitcoin balances are stored in a large distributed network, and they cannot be fraudulently altered by anybody.
In other words, Bitcoin users have exclusive control over their funds and bitcoins cannot vanish just because they are virtual. Bitcoin is designed to allow its users to send and receive payments with an acceptable level of privacy as well as any other form of money. However, Bitcoin is not anonymous and cannot offer the same level of privacy as cash.
The use of Bitcoin leaves extensive public records. Various mechanisms exist to protect users' privacy, and more are in development. However, there is still work to be done before these features are used correctly by most Bitcoin users.
Some concerns have been raised that private transactions could be used for illegal purposes with Bitcoin. However, it is worth noting that Bitcoin will undoubtedly be subjected to similar regulations that are already in place inside existing financial systems. Bitcoin cannot be more anonymous than cash and it is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted. Additionally, Bitcoin is also designed to prevent a large range of financial crimes. When a user loses his wallet, it has the effect of removing money out of circulation.
Lost bitcoins still remain in the block chain just like any other bitcoins. However, lost bitcoins remain dormant forever because there is no way for anybody to find the private key s that would allow them to be spent again. Because of the law of supply and demand, when fewer bitcoins are available, the ones that are left will be in higher demand and increase in value to compensate. The Bitcoin network can already process a much higher number of transactions per second than it does today.
It is, however, not entirely ready to scale to the level of major credit card networks. Work is underway to lift current limitations, and future requirements are well known.
Since inception, every aspect of the Bitcoin network has been in a continuous process of maturation, optimization, and specialization, and it should be expected to remain that way for some years to come. As traffic grows, more Bitcoin users may use lightweight clients, and full network nodes may become a more specialized service.
For more details, see the Scalability page on the Wiki. To the best of our knowledge, Bitcoin has not been made illegal by legislation in most jurisdictions.
However, some jurisdictions such as Argentina and Russia severely restrict or ban foreign currencies. Other jurisdictions such as Thailand may limit the licensing of certain entities such as Bitcoin exchanges. Regulators from various jurisdictions are taking steps to provide individuals and businesses with rules on how to integrate this new technology with the formal, regulated financial system. Bitcoin is money, and money has always been used both for legal and illegal purposes.
Cash, credit cards and current banking systems widely surpass Bitcoin in terms of their use to finance crime. Bitcoin can bring significant innovation in payment systems and the benefits of such innovation are often considered to be far beyond their potential drawbacks.
Bitcoin is designed to be a huge step forward in making money more secure and could also act as a significant protection against many forms of financial crime. For instance, bitcoins are completely impossible to counterfeit. Users are in full control of their payments and cannot receive unapproved charges such as with credit card fraud. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and immune to fraudulent chargebacks.
Bitcoin allows money to be secured against theft and loss using very strong and useful mechanisms such as backups, encryption, and multiple signatures.
Some concerns have been raised that Bitcoin could be more attractive to criminals because it can be used to make private and irreversible payments. However, these features already exist with cash and wire transfer, which are widely used and well-established. The use of Bitcoin will undoubtedly be subjected to similar regulations that are already in place inside existing financial systems, and Bitcoin is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted.
In general, it is common for important breakthroughs to be perceived as being controversial before their benefits are well understood. The Internet is a good example among many others to illustrate this. The Bitcoin protocol itself cannot be modified without the cooperation of nearly all its users, who choose what software they use. Attempting to assign special rights to a local authority in the rules of the global Bitcoin network is not a practical possibility.
Any rich organization could choose to invest in mining hardware to control half of the computing power of the network and become able to block or reverse recent transactions. However, there is no guarantee that they could retain this power since this requires to invest as much than all other miners in the world. It is however possible to regulate the use of Bitcoin in a similar way to any other instrument.
Just like the dollar, Bitcoin can be used for a wide variety of purposes, some of which can be considered legitimate or not as per each jurisdiction's laws. In this regard, Bitcoin is no different than any other tool or resource and can be subjected to different regulations in each country. Bitcoin use could also be made difficult by restrictive regulations, in which case it is hard to determine what percentage of users would keep using the technology.
A government that chooses to ban Bitcoin would prevent domestic businesses and markets from developing, shifting innovation to other countries. The challenge for regulators, as always, is to develop efficient solutions while not impairing the growth of new emerging markets and businesses.
Bitcoin is not a fiat currency with legal tender status in any jurisdiction, but often tax liability accrues regardless of the medium used. There is a wide variety of legislation in many different jurisdictions which could cause income, sales, payroll, capital gains, or some other form of tax liability to arise with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is freeing people to transact on their own terms.
Each user can send and receive payments in a similar way to cash but they can also take part in more complex contracts. Multiple signatures allow a transaction to be accepted by the network only if a certain number of a defined group of persons agree to sign the transaction. This allows innovative dispute mediation services to be developed in the future.
Such services could allow a third party to approve or reject a transaction in case of disagreement between the other parties without having control on their money.
As opposed to cash and other payment methods, Bitcoin always leaves a public proof that a transaction did take place, which can potentially be used in a recourse against businesses with fraudulent practices. It is also worth noting that while merchants usually depend on their public reputation to remain in business and pay their employees, they don't have access to the same level of information when dealing with new consumers.
The way Bitcoin works allows both individuals and businesses to be protected against fraudulent chargebacks while giving the choice to the consumer to ask for more protection when they are not willing to trust a particular merchant.
New bitcoins are generated by a competitive and decentralized process called "mining". This process involves that individuals are rewarded by the network for their services. Bitcoin miners are processing transactions and securing the network using specialized hardware and are collecting new bitcoins in exchange.
The Bitcoin protocol is designed in such a way that new bitcoins are created at a fixed rate. This makes Bitcoin mining a very competitive business. When more miners join the network, it becomes increasingly difficult to make a profit and miners must seek efficiency to cut their operating costs. No central authority or developer has any power to control or manipulate the system to increase their profits.
Every Bitcoin node in the world will reject anything that does not comply with the rules it expects the system to follow. Bitcoins are created at a decreasing and predictable rate. The number of new bitcoins created each year is automatically halved over time until bitcoin issuance halts completely with a total of 21 million bitcoins in existence. At this point, Bitcoin miners will probably be supported exclusively by numerous small transaction fees. Bitcoins have value because they are useful as a form of money.
Bitcoin has the characteristics of money durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties like gold and silver or trust in central authorities like fiat currencies. In short, Bitcoin is backed by mathematics. With these attributes, all that is required for a form of money to hold value is trust and adoption.
In the case of Bitcoin, this can be measured by its growing base of users, merchants, and startups. As with all currency, bitcoin's value comes only and directly from people willing to accept them as payment. The price of a bitcoin is determined by supply and demand. When demand for bitcoins increases, the price increases, and when demand falls, the price falls. There is only a limited number of bitcoins in circulation and new bitcoins are created at a predictable and decreasing rate, which means that demand must follow this level of inflation to keep the price stable.
Because Bitcoin is still a relatively small market compared to what it could be, it doesn't take significant amounts of money to move the market price up or down, and thus the price of a bitcoin is still very volatile. History is littered with currencies that failed and are no longer used, such as the German Mark during the Weimar Republic and, more recently, the Zimbabwean dollar.
Although previous currency failures were typically due to hyperinflation of a kind that Bitcoin makes impossible, there is always potential for technical failures, competing currencies, political issues and so on.
As a basic rule of thumb, no currency should be considered absolutely safe from failures or hard times. Bitcoin has proven reliable for years since its inception and there is a lot of potential for Bitcoin to continue to grow.
However, no one is in a position to predict what the future will be for Bitcoin. A fast rise in price does not constitute a bubble. An artificial over-valuation that will lead to a sudden downward correction constitutes a bubble. Choices based on individual human action by hundreds of thousands of market participants is the cause for bitcoin's price to fluctuate as the market seeks price discovery.
Reasons for changes in sentiment may include a loss of confidence in Bitcoin, a large difference between value and price not based on the fundamentals of the Bitcoin economy, increased press coverage stimulating speculative demand, fear of uncertainty, and old-fashioned irrational exuberance and greed. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money, or the money paid by subsequent investors, instead of from profit earned by the individuals running the business.
Ponzi schemes are designed to collapse at the expense of the last investors when there is not enough new participants. Bitcoin is a free software project with no central authority. Consequently, no one is in a position to make fraudulent representations about investment returns. Like other major currencies such as gold, United States dollar, euro, yen, etc. This leads to volatility where owners of bitcoins can unpredictably make or lose money. Beyond speculation, Bitcoin is also a payment system with useful and competitive attributes that are being used by thousands of users and businesses.
Some early adopters have large numbers of bitcoins because they took risks and invested time and resources in an unproven technology that was hardly used by anyone and that was much harder to secure properly. Many early adopters spent large numbers of bitcoins quite a few times before they became valuable or bought only small amounts and didn't make huge gains.
There is no guarantee that the price of a bitcoin will increase or drop. This is very similar to investing in an early startup that can either gain value through its usefulness and popularity, or just never break through. Bitcoin is still in its infancy, and it has been designed with a very long-term view; it is hard to imagine how it could be less biased towards early adopters, and today's users may or may not be the early adopters of tomorrow.
Bitcoin is unique in that only 21 million bitcoins will ever be created. However, this will never be a limitation because transactions can be denominated in smaller sub-units of a bitcoin, such as bits - there are 1,, bits in 1 bitcoin. Bitcoins can be divided up to 8 decimal places 0. The deflationary spiral theory says that if prices are expected to fall, people will move purchases into the future in order to benefit from the lower prices.
That fall in demand will in turn cause merchants to lower their prices to try and stimulate demand, making the problem worse and leading to an economic depression.
Although this theory is a popular way to justify inflation amongst central bankers, it does not appear to always hold true and is considered controversial amongst economists. Consumer electronics is one example of a market where prices constantly fall but which is not in depression.
Similarly, the value of bitcoins has risen over time and yet the size of the Bitcoin economy has also grown dramatically along with it. Because both the value of the currency and the size of its economy started at zero in , Bitcoin is a counterexample to the theory showing that it must sometimes be wrong. Notwithstanding this, Bitcoin is not designed to be a deflationary currency. It is more accurate to say Bitcoin is intended to inflate in its early years, and become stable in its later years.
The only time the quantity of bitcoins in circulation will drop is if people carelessly lose their wallets by failing to make backups. With a stable monetary base and a stable economy, the value of the currency should remain the same.
This is a chicken and egg situation. For bitcoin's price to stabilize, a large scale economy needs to develop with more businesses and users. For a large scale economy to develop, businesses and users will seek for price stability. Fortunately, volatility does not affect the main benefits of Bitcoin as a payment system to transfer money from point A to point B. It is possible for businesses to convert bitcoin payments to their local currency instantly, allowing them to profit from the advantages of Bitcoin without being subjected to price fluctuations.
Since Bitcoin offers many useful and unique features and properties, many users choose to use Bitcoin. With such solutions and incentives, it is possible that Bitcoin will mature and develop to a degree where price volatility will become limited.
Only a fraction of bitcoins issued to date are found on the exchange markets for sale. Bitcoin markets are competitive, meaning the price of a bitcoin will rise or fall depending on supply and demand.
Additionally, new bitcoins will continue to be issued for decades to come. Therefore even the most determined buyer could not buy all the bitcoins in existence. This situation isn't to suggest, however, that the markets aren't vulnerable to price manipulation; it still doesn't take significant amounts of money to move the market price up or down, and thus Bitcoin remains a volatile asset thus far. For now, Bitcoin remains by far the most popular decentralized virtual currency, but there can be no guarantee that it will retain that position.
There is already a set of alternative currencies inspired by Bitcoin. It is however probably correct to assume that significant improvements would be required for a new currency to overtake Bitcoin in terms of established market, even though this remains unpredictable. Bitcoin could also conceivably adopt improvements of a competing currency so long as it doesn't change fundamental parts of the protocol.
Receiving notification of a payment is almost instant with Bitcoin. However, there is a delay before the network begins to confirm your transaction by including it in a block. A confirmation means that there is a consensus on the network that the bitcoins you received haven't been sent to anyone else and are considered your property. Once your transaction has been included in one block, it will continue to be buried under every block after it, which will exponentially consolidate this consensus and decrease the risk of a reversed transaction.
Each confirmation takes between a few seconds and 90 minutes, with 10 minutes being the average. You know, if you invest in the stock market, it's going to fluctuate, but you have shares in something whereas with bitcoin it just seems like an act of faith in bitcoin. Well, you are certainly right. I should note I think that, you know, all of those instances you just mentioned - the U. I mean, if you kind of dig a little deeper, you know, what you're expressing faith in when you express faith in the dollar is essentially the U.
You're believing that those are going to be around. And obviously, that's not maybe a hard thing to believe in, but there's some chance that it won't happen. And certainly there are countries where the government has issued currency and then the government has fallen and the currency has turned out to be worthless.
So to a degree, money is always about faith. It's about believing that the thing you're holding in your hand is going to be worth something tomorrow, next week, in a month and that somebody will take it and give you something in exchange.
The same is true with bitcoin. And certainly, there are not the institutions backing it up that you have for the U. But what is backing it up is this network.
And so you in essence are sort of expressing your faith in that network and the power of the network and the power of the rules behind bitcoin to draw people to this currency and to make people think that the network, you know, may outlive the U. I wouldn't argue that myself. I don't know the odds. I would say probably the odds of the U. But I think that a lot of people have - had assumed that bitcoin - that the bitcoin network wouldn't survive to, you know, through the first year, much less the first eight years, which it's done.
And it's sort of continued to kind of engender this faith among the people who believe in it, who follow it. We're talking about bitcoin, the digital currency that was created in Although its roots were in idealism and libertarianism, it first became widely used for purchases on the dark web, the sites on the Internet black market selling drugs and sex.
But this digital currency is now being used for more mainstream purchases. Big banks are starting to find uses for some of the innovative structure of the bitcoin system. A couple of years ago, he wrote a book about bitcoin called "Digital Gold. So when bitcoin was first released into the world, it was determined by the person who released it, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, he or she determined how much bitcoin there would be in this world.
There's a finite amount of bitcoin that will ever be released to make sure that, like gold, it retains its value. So it's a kind of complicated process how bitcoin is created or mined. Mined is the word that's used. New bitcoin is mined. So would you just tell us a little bit, like, in a comprehensive way about how new bitcoin is mined?
It's a dangerous question, and it's a hard one to answer simply, but, you know, the answer to how bitcoin are created does sort of give you some glimpse into the inner workings of how this thing functions and why it has survived as long as it has. I mean, essentially, bitcoin released onto the network every 10 minutes.
A new block of bitcoin is released onto the network every 10 minutes. And this started on the very first day. On the very first day, there was zero bitcoin in the world. And after 10 minutes - after about 10 minutes, 50 bitcoin were released to one of the computers that was hooked into the network, which at that point was Satoshi Nakamoto's computers.
They were almost the only computers that were hooked in at that point. But the rules of bitcoin - the software determine how those bitcoins, those new bitcoins being released, are going to be distributed to people. And the first thing that this does is that it encourages people to join the network.
You can essentially - at least early on, you could essentially get free bitcoin if you joined the network. And so it incentivized people to join the network. The other thing it did was that it got those computers to start keeping the records for the network. So if you want to win those bitcoins, essentially you have to start working as an accountant for the network and registering all the new transactions that come in.
And if you are doing that - the more computers you add to help, you know, serve as accountant for the network, the better chance you have of winning bitcoins.
And so that is how sort of the records are kept, and that's how you get people to volunteer to keep the records. You give them new bitcoins. You offer these new bitcoins. So over time, that incentive system has generated this enormous network.
Right now, there's something like 13, nodes or computers hooked into the network that are helping to keep these records. And a lot of those are mining, trying to win these new bitcoins. And so this complicated economic system was set up with lots of incentives in there to get people to participate and to sort of create the foundation for this decentralized network to keep all the records.
So you can't just say, well, I want to create new bitcoin. It's a kind of interesting process. You're basically competing with other people who also want to create new bitcoin.
So what do you have? Do you have, like, a lot of computers competing with each other? And what's the competition? Like, what are the Let's make sure not to go too deep data because it's based on cryptography and encryption, which is sort of the leading edge of math, you know, basically really hard math problems you have to solve. But at the most basic, computers are trying to process all the transactions coming into the bitcoin network as quickly as possible. And the faster you do it, the more efficiently you do it, the better chance you have of winning bitcoin.
There's an element of luck in it. It's somewhat like a lottery, but essentially the person with the most computing power has the best chance of winning the lottery. And so what's that - what that's created today is a world in which you have literally server farms in outer - inner Mongolia, in Tibet, in Iceland. Anywhere where you can get cheap electricity to run computers very fast, people have set up basically server farms, big, you know, buildings just filled with computers trying to sort of unlock these new bitcoins but also sort of serving as the backbone of this network.
And, you know, the more computers you have joined in, the more secure the network is, the harder it is to attack. And it's this crazy world in which - I mean, literally in China, which has become one of the most, you know, one of the places where you have the most bitcoin mining, you know, spread all around China, you have next to - you know, next to hydroelectric dams and next to a coal plants, people have set up these server farms that are dedicated to doing nothing but mining bitcoin.
I went a couple years ago to one in China. They have gotten a lot bigger and more sophisticated since then. I mean, there are literally sort of towns that are built around this in China where you have people just living in the bitcoin mining facility, you know, Chinese people who really - you know, the people who are working there are sort of the custodians.
They - most of them have no idea really what's going on or how the system works. But it's - you know, it's created this whole economy. So bitcoin is being used as an investment vehicle in the U.
It's being used for investing, in speculation. How is that playing out here? Well, very well for the people who bought it early on. And that has attracted a whole bunch of new people to this. It's attracted people around the world. Here, what you've seen is a lot of hedge funds getting into this game. So there are now hedge funds being set up. Something like hedge funds in the last year have been set up to invest exclusively in virtual currencies, bitcoin as well as some of the competitors that have sprung up.
Well, say this is a bubble, what happens laughter? I mean, like, the price of bitcoin has been shooting straight up, but things that go up sometimes come back down.
I mean, if you look at the chart of the bitcoin price since it was born, it is just a series of spikes and then drops, and then spikes and then drops.
And over time, you know, you get the spike, and it drops down to a level that is generally still higher than where it was before the spike, but lower than the spike. And so I think a lot of people are asking right now how long this can go on. And certainly, you've heard numerous CEOs of banks say, this is unsustainable; this is a bubble; this is going to crash.
And I think there's no doubt that there probably is going to be some reckoning here. I mean, this meets many of the definitions of a bubble.
People are speculating on the future value and desire for bitcoin. People are speculating that this will serve more purposes in the future and will be more valuable to more people in the future than it is today. And they're betting - a lot of people are just betting that the price is going to go up without knowing anything about it. And those are a lot of the characteristics that you see in bubbles. I mean, you know, the counterargument is that this is the first time that we've had a scarce digital resource.
So I - the Internet, until now - most things on the Internet, you can copy and paste, right? That's what the music industry found. You can copy and paste an MP3. You can copy and paste a movie file.
Things aren't scarce on the Internet, and one of the things that bitcoin did through this weird, complicated system of incentives is, it created a scarce digital asset for the first time.
So a lot of people think about this now as something like digital gold. You know, this is a place where you can keep your money because there's only going to be so many of them, and the system works, and it's in some ways better than gold because, you know, gold, you can't carry across a border secretly.
You can't - you can try to stuff it in your underwear. But, you know, gold, people can - it's hard to travel with gold. Bitcoin - as long as you have that password, you can go somewhere else with internet access and you have access to your money.
So that's the sort of thesis on this. But I think that the sort of expectations and the types of people who are getting into this right now, a lot of them are not terribly sophisticated. So of the maximum 21 million bitcoin that can be released by - what were - year was it, ?
We're getting close to 17 million. So the reward to people who are helping to support the network falls in half every four years.
OK, it's time for a short break. Let me reintroduce you. My guest is Nathaniel Popper. We're talking about bitcoin, and he's been writing about bitcoin for several years.
He's a tech reporter for The New York Times who wrote a book a couple of years ago about bitcoin called "Digital Gold. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Nathaniel Popper. He's a tech reporter at The New York Times. And we're talking about bitcoin - digital currency - and he's been covering bitcoin for several years. A couple of years ago, he wrote a book about it called "Digital Gold.
So, you know, whether you use bitcoin or not, whether you think it's going to last or not, the architecture of the system seems pretty ingenious. And there are major banks and even the New York Stock Exchange, you know, that are picking up on some of the architecture to borrow it for their own purposes, and what they're borrowing from is what's called the blockchain.
Would you explain what that is and how, like, major banks are trying to borrow that system? Well, I think the blockchain, in the simplest sense, is the record of all the bitcoin transactions.
It's a ledger, a sort of a spreadsheet on which bitcoin transactions are recorded. But what's special about the bitcoin ledger - the bitcoin blockchain - is that it's not kept by a central institution. It's kept by a bunch of people, and part of the idea is that it's a bunch of people who don't trust each other but can use this system to have a sort of shared record of their assets. And so this blockchain idea, this idea of keeping records in a decentralized way so that anybody can consult it and that nobody is in charge - that idea of the blockchain is something that's piqued a lot of interest in the financial industry but also in a whole bunch of other industries.
IBM has made this one of their biggest pushes over the last few years to kind of try to regain relevance. They have made a big move into the blockchain industry, as has Microsoft. And they're essentially making a bet that this is a new way to track information. And, you know, we live in an information economy, and so if you can come up with new ways to track and store information more reliably, it has the potential to recreate some of the foundations of the information economy.
It really sounds rather vague. You know, when you just look at something like the financial industry, the banks are looking at this as, you know - maybe instead of paying the New York Stock Exchange to buy and sell stocks there, and then transfer the money for us, and move the stocks back and forth and make sure all the records are kept, maybe we - all the banks - we can just set up a blockchain where we can all trade, and we don't have to pay anybody in the middle, and we can keep track of all those records, and all of us can do it without trusting any of the other people in the system.
And that's the sort of basic idea that I think has given rise to this whole new industry. So you're not allowed to invest in bitcoin because you cover it for The New York Times.
Are you allowed to use it, and have you used it? I mean, our take at The New York Times has basically been, I can have enough to play with and understand it. And I think the understanding has generally been that, you know, those bitcoins essentially belong to The New York Times so that I don't get any big ideas.
But yeah, I mean, I'm in there on a daily basis trying to understand how these things work, how you move between different currencies, how it can move around the world.
And that's been an important part of reporting on this. Well, companies - not surprisingly, companies have sprung up to make this very easy for you to take your money and give you bitcoin.
You know, there's - probably the biggest company in the United States is a company called Coinbase, which is essentially a sort of Charles Schwab or an E-Trade for bitcoin. You send them money, and then you can trade on their platform. You can move in and out of bitcoin.
And then you can take your money out and transfer it back to your bank. And they've made it very easy so that anybody - you know, so it's as easy as - probably easier than buying a stock is through E-Trade. And part of what's interesting there - I guess that's not too surprising.
What's interesting is that the government and regulators have essentially allowed this to happen, have said, this is OK. New York - state of New York has created a BitLicense that Coinbase has, and that makes it easier for them to do this and easier to get bank accounts.
And so at least in the United States, the government has sort of said, we're going to let this happen; we realize there might be something of value here, so we're not going to try to kill this. Have you had any great bitcoin adventures in researching your book or writing for The New York Times that you could share for - share with us?
I mean, this whole thing has been such an incredible story. I mean, that's why I was drawn to it. I mean, the number of people who have gone to jail - often shortly after getting fabulously wealthy - is incredible. And so a lot of the stories I talk - tell in my book are these stories of these astronomic rises followed by these incredible falls. And oftentimes, I was there.