Hi, everyone. And welcome back to geek time. Hi, Brad.

Hi, Lulu.

So what is our topic for today?

We're gonna be talking about cryptocurrency. We kind of talked about NFTs before. And NFTs kind of share a basic background with cryptocurrency, but we haven't really gotten into cryptocurrency before. So I think this is where we can kind of get into it.

Yeah. This is where everything started basically. First of all, cryptocurrency在中文叫加密货币. I think many people think of cryptocurrency, they think of Bitcoin 比特币 or even Dogecoin 狗狗币. But what exactly is cryptocurrency?

Oh, cryptocurrency is just a currency that doesn't have a central government or authority controlling it. So when you have your dollar, your Renminbi, someone had to print that or control the amount of it. And rather than that,

It’s usually the central bank, isn't it?

Like the central bank. But rather than that, this is something that's online. And there's like a digital ledger that has a list of everyone who has bought or sold the currency. And so they know who has what and this can be like anonymous. And that's why a lot of people really wanted it. But nowadays a lot of the exchanges are kind of starting to collect your personal data for tax purposes and things like that.

I see. so let me slow this down a little bit. There's no central authority. 一般来说我们生活中接触的货币, 不管是人民币或者说美金日元, 它都是由central bank一般都是央行来发行的, but cryptocurrency essentially there is no authority, no central authority, no government involved, and no regulatory bodies, 没有这种监管的机构.

So It's just everything stored in a ledger. You said像一个账本, a digital ledger.

Right.

And some people can be anonymous. They can - you don't know who they are. They're just an account number, but others might have to register. They might have to have their personal data there.

Yeah, so oftentimes if you're looking at the blockchain, you may not be able to know who the person is. But if you go to like, for example, the government will know who this person is because they've signed up for an exchange and that exchange has tied their account number to their name

I see and you mentioned blockchain. This was one of the hottest buzzwords a few years back, blockchain, 区块链.

Till this day I still don't know exactly what blockchain is, but I know this is the technology behind cryptocurrency, right? Blockchain made cryptocurrency possible.

Yeah, it is basically just all the data. Blockchain is the ledger. You have to decrypt and encrypt all the data. So whenever someone buys or sells something using the cryptocurrency or whenever cryptocurrency is traded, it has to go through authorization and they have to run the blockchain. In order to do this, they're using hundreds of computers or thousands of computers and they go through a process that's referred to as mining. So sounds you're like mining for gold. And essentially, that's what you're doing by using your computer to help the blockchain process. You're going to get some sort of payment.

Let me stop you there. So mining here就是挖矿. It's like you are mining for gold or mining for diamonds. And this is a way to make money in this cryptocurrency world?

Yeah. because rather than have - like a government doing all the mining or regulation, everyone is pitching in to do the regulation or to do the mining to move the data or to move the currency from one person to another.

Oh, I see it's like a community thing almost. I've heard of people doing the mining, 其实我自己朋友圈里面也有人去参与这种cryptocurrency的挖矿.

For all I can see as an outsider is they have just computers and then they run certain programs. But how do you get paid? Is it like real gold mining that you just like dig dig dig and then you can find some loose coins somewhere?

No. Like most currencies have their own kind of like separate wallet and they pay from this wallet to the people who are mining.

And so by letting the cryptocurrency use your computer for processing, you are going to get that, you're gonna get paid for that. And you can either have a big farm that's going to do all the data mining and you can get paid for what you actually decode or encrypt or you can be part of a community and together you're putting all your processing power together. And by doing that. If you are the one who encrypt it, then you get paid based on how much processing you gave to that community. And for people who don't have a lot of computers, that's a better option because you're gonna get paid one way or another. It's just a matter of you actually have the ability to make smaller amounts and get paid regularly rather than maybe not get paid for a long time.

这个就是要么你自己有很多台电脑, 你可以自己一个人最后成功地去decrypt, 或者你干脆加入一个组织跟别人一起去挖, 然后最后只要是谁挖到了这个组织里面整个的挖到了, 你总能得到一点payment.

Now coming back to different types of cryptocurrency, now there are so many of them, right? It started with Bitcoin从比特币开始, but then you have so many others, but some of these are pretty useless, aren't they？

Yeah. There's a - you mentioned Dogecoin earlier. That's a really popular one. We call it a meme coin because it's based off of a meme. But then there's other coins like Ethereum which is actually quite popular and it doesn't have the value of Bitcoin. It is rather valuable. But there's all these different coins out there and refer to them as like two basic types. There's alternative coins or altcoins and stablecoins.

Alternate coins这里就是替代货币, 也就是替代比特币的其他的这些加密货币. They're basically cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin.

Right. It's the same thing as same basic idea as Bitcoin. It's just not as expensive, so people can kind of get into it a little bit easier. But yeah, like there's also something aside from alternative coins, we call them shitcoins.

对, 中文的翻译就是直译的shitcoins就被叫做屎币. Does that mean they're really shitty, they're just really worthless?

They don't really have any value. If they did have any value, it's for a very very short period of time. If you look at like Dogecoin, for example, Dogecoin was basically worthless for the longest time.

And then like back in like last year, it started getting a little bit of value. Like Elon Musk started saying he was going to move to Dogecoin over Bitcoin, so like people started wanting to get into Dogecoin. The value like went up from maybe like a 1/5 of a penny to like 70 cents or almost 70 cents at one point. And it just dropped back down. It's still something like 8 to 9 cents or something right now, which is fairly good for some currencies, but like the value of it is still not as high as it once hit.

Yeah. Let me ask you a personal question, Brad, you seem to know a lot about Dogecoin. Does that mean you actually invested in Dogecoin？

I did invest in Dogecoin, like I knew that the value of Dogecoin was going to go up when Elon Musk started talking about it, I didn't make a lot of money, but I did get like something like 25% return on my investment. I didn't invest a lot of money.

That’s very impressive.

But yeah, aside from that, I don't really like buy or sell coins. I do use a browser that pays me for advertising in coin. So like I get paid for like any advertisements that like pop up on my computer from the browser.

But they pay you in cryptocurrency.

Right.

I see. After you made that 25% of profit from Dogecoin, have you actually sold it for real dollars?

I didn't keep the coin for very long. I think I kept it for like 1 or 2 days and that was the longest, but yeah like, aside from that, we have stablecoins.

Stablecoins就是稳定币，叫做稳定币. Is that the opposite of shitcoins?

Kind of. Basically when you look at the big coins like Bitcoin or Ethereum, like the majority of those are being used for investments rather than actually as a currency these days. Like only 33% of Bitcoin is actually used for actual like currency.

The other 66% is all tied up and just people investing in it. And so that's like a large amount, right? Whereas stablecoins are not meant to be used as like an investment. There are people are wanting to have a coin that can actually be used just as a currency that you can use to buy and sell things.

I see.

Yeah like if you bought - say for example, you bought Bitcoin or you used, you were got paid in Bitcoin. Then like the next week, like the value of Bitcoin dropped in half of your salary is gone just because the currency value dropped, right? And people don't want that. People want coin that’s stable.

I see they just want like a normal, stable digital currency.

That's right.

That they can rely on as a way to get payment, right?

Like if you get a payment, if you work for you run a business, and you have to - a cup of coffee is $5 or it's like a 0.0001 Bitcoin because Bitcoin’s values like $30,000. It makes it a little bit difficult.

But like if you're getting cryptocurrency and the value is fluctuating, really high and low, then you can't really determine the value of it for your products. And people don't want that.

I see you know before we wrap up this basic episode, which is already very confusing, I just want to ask, who started all this, who created the first cryptocurrency Bitcoin?

That is a very interesting question. There is a man or woman or group of people known as Satoshi Nakamoto. And people don't really know who he is like. There's the people who were involved in the original creation of Bitcoin. And some of them probably know who this person really is, but no one has come forth and actually said that we know who this person is directly. A few people have said there, Satoshi, a few people have said, oh I know who it is, it's this person. But there's never been anything conclusive about who this person is. And a lot of people really want to know because there's a large wallet of Bitcoin that has not been moved. And a lot of people think that this happens to be this person, Satoshi’s actual like wallet.

And so they're waiting to see what happens was he going to move the currency or sell it once it gets to a certain value.

Cash in? 这个故事我也听过, 就是叫中本聪, 到目前也没有一个确切的证实说这个人到底是谁. 就像Brad说确实有人出来自称自己是中本聪, but it has never been confirmed, actually you know that Satoshi Nakamoto, has been called a cypherpunk, 密码朋克.

Yeah just like cyberpunk, cypherpunk.

Like cyberpunk, it’s cypherpunk. So that holy grail that huge wallet containing all this Bitcoin is just waiting to be collected. Sounds like a treasure hunt.

You could actually get to, into the wall. It would be very nice because you could probably become a billionaire. At least a millionaire.

Well maybe billion times over. All right. On that note, we're gonna wrap up here. We've covered some of the basics, or at least, I hope they're basic enough, the some of the basic terms. In the advanced episode, Brad and I are gonna go deeper into the topic of cryptocurrency and we're gonna talk about some of the scams and speculation and crime related to cryptocurrency. If you know anything about cryptocurrency or if you have ever invested in cryptocurrency yourself, leave us a comment in the comment section. Thank you, Brad.

Thank you, Lulu. See you next time.

We'll see you next time.