I think I knew quite a bit about bitcoin before I saw the documentary. This was because in secondary school I took a course in economics where we thoroughly studied the different crypto currencies.
However, I have learned many things and some of my assumptions were even disproved. For example:
- With the crypto currency you cannot buy real or susceptible things. You can only use it to invest or buy shares on an invisible market.
- However, in the documentary we saw that a man had even used bitcoins to pay someone on the other side of the world to buy a pizza. It was one of the first real purchases in the non-digital world with the currency. Now it has evolved to the point where you can use bitcoin to buy your hot dog at a stall or pay for your groceries at the local Chinese supermarket. Bitcoin is not just for the web and intangible things. You can use it to buy « real things ».
- Bitcoins are not a good investment because it is mostly hype and not a new currency.
- Here too we saw the opposite in the documentary. The value of bitcoin rose very quickly, but also fell just as quickly. However, it is the same with shares on the market. Investing in it is always at your own risk and is something you should be aware of if you want to do it right. In the documentary, they followed a man who had invested a lot in the currency, but was not scared when the value of his coins plummeted. He knew that his coins could rise in value as quickly as they fell. So for him it was a matter of being patient and not making hasty decisions.
- Bitcoins will never replace real coins or currency.
- This is where I was quite wrong. We learned in the documentary that in the less developed countries bitcoin was very popular. This was because ATMs were often very far away for people there and so real paper money was scarce. However, the digital currency only needs the internet. Many people can now make money transactions more easily than before.
In short, I did not know as much about the currency as I first thought. But since the documentary is outdated, the landscape of bitcoin looks completely different now. I will keep my eyes open for articles on bitcoin in the future, because the documentary not only taught me a lot. It also sparked my interest in it.
Photo: UnSplash
