What is Bitcoin? Should I care?
A well known champion of bitcoin, Andreas Antonopolis, calls bitcoin “the most exciting, most interesting and probably the most important technological invention in the last 20 years“. And that may be a gross understatement. Nothing like bitcoin has ever existed before in all of human history.
“Bitcoin is digital money, but saying that is like saying the internet is a fancy telephone“.
Some other ways to describe bitcoin:
digital gold, a store of value, international money, a worldwide currency, a cryptocurrency
Some other bitcoin adjectives:
censorship resistant, trustless, unconfiscatable, borderless, open, neutral, voluntary, non-violent enforcement
Over the centuries, due to war, famine, natural disaster, persecution, etc., people needed to move to other parts of the world. In some cases, those migrating had some money or property in their home countries. Could they bring any of their wealth to their new home? Not easily. Maybe they could sew some gold coins into their clothes to fool the border guards. Because of the difficulty in taking your wealth with you, many immigrants arrived at their new destination with literally, just the clothes on their back.
Recently, it’s become much easier to travel; but bringing some wealth with you was still very difficult. Try getting on a plane with a pocket full of gold coins or a suitcase full of cash. It’s likely you and your money will go separate ways.
Today, with the invention of bitcoin, you can now take $20, $100, $5,000 or millions with you anywhere in the world and then convert it to the local currency or buy things as needed. However, you MUST remember your bitcoin password. In the bitcoin world, your password is known as your "private key". If you forget your private key; you’ve lost all of your bitcoin(money). With bitcoin, you are your own banker and your own bank.
Now you probably have more questions than when you started reading. There’s a lot to it. This is barely the tip of the iceberg. Researching bitcoin beyond this point is referred to as going down the bitcoin rabbithole. It never ends.
So, should you own any bitcoin?
I can’t tell you how much bitcoin you should own. I can tell you that zero is the wrong amount. This in not financial advice.
The price of 1 bitcoin on Jan. 12, 2019 was $3,669. Did I mention that the price of bitcoin is highly volatile? Also, you don't need to buy a whole bitcoin. You can buy almost any amount e.g. $5's worth, $100, $9,765.57, a million...