The Greatest Bitcoin Explanation of ALL TIME (in Under 10 Minutes)

what is bitcoin what does Bitcoin do is it perfect neither was email when it was invented in 1972. this is the greatest Bitcoin explanation of all time if you have a family member that doesn't quite understand cryptocurrency send him or her this they will thank you thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today my name is Peter van valkenberg and I'm the director of research at coin Center an independent non-profit focused on the public policy issues affecting cryptocurrency and public blockchain networks what is bitcoin Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency and it works because of the world's first public blockchain network what does Bitcoin do it's simple it lets you send and receive value to and from anyone in the world using nothing more than a computer and an internet connection now why is it revolutionary because unlike every other tool for sending money over the Internet it works without the need to trust a middleman the lack of any Corporation in between means that Bitcoin is the world's first public digital payments infrastructure and by public I simply mean available to all and not owned by any single entity now we have public infrastructure for information for websites for email it's called the internet but the only public payments infrastructure that we have is cash as in paper money and it only works in face-to-face transactions before Bitcoin if you wanted to pay someone remotely over the phone or the internet then you could not use public infrastructure you would rely on a private bank to open their books and add a ledger entry that debits you and credits the person you're paying and if you both don't use the same bank well then there'll be multiple Banks and multiple Ledger entries in between with Bitcoin The Ledger is the public blockchain and anyone can add an entry to that ledger transferring their Bitcoins to someone else and anyone regardless of their nationality race religion gender sex or credit worthiness can for absolutely no cost create a Bitcoin address in order to receive payments digitally Bitcoin is the world's first globally accessible public money is it perfect no neither was email when it was invented in 1972. bitcoin's not the best money on every margin uh it's not yet accepted everywhere it's not used often to quote prices and it's not always a stable store of value but it is working and the mere fact that it works without trusted intermediaries is amazing it's a computer science breakthrough and it will be as significant for Freedom prosperity and human flourishing as the birth of the internet and Bitcoin is just the beginning if we can replace private payments infrastructure then we can replace other private choke points to human interaction as well now why should we want to build more public infrastructure why should we Embrace blockchains over corporate intermediaries why should we tolerate their inefficiencies and work to make them better why should we want the pioneers of this technology here in the United States and not fleeing overseas a simple reason because the corporate intermediaries providing today's critical but privately owned infrastructure are becoming fewer larger and more powerful and their failures are in critics increasingly grave so roughly half of all Americans 143 million people had their social security numbers exposed to hackers because of a breach at Equifax the Swift network has relayed hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions because of hacked member banks in Bangladesh Vietnam Ecuador and Russia the FBI suspects now that the largest of these hacks was perpetrated by North Korea corrupt low-level employees at an Indian Bank Punjab National were able to fraudulently certify Swift messages stealing 1.

8 billion dollars it's the largest electronic bank robbery in history in fact it's the largest bank robbery in history in October 2016 an estimated 1. 2 million Internet connected devices were hacked and turned into a botnet that for several hours made prominent websites unavailable across Europe and North America including CNN and Fox News The New York Times And The Wall Street Journal increasingly physical machines are being connected to the internet to augment their capabilities they're wired through servers that are owned and maintained by private and trusted intermediaries the so-called Internet of Things pacemakers from St Jude's Hospital have been hacked baby monitors from trendnet have been hacked and jeeps from Jeep have been hacked to the point where they can be remotely commandeered and driven off the road now those vulnerabilities are inescapable in systems that have single points of failure it doesn't matter if the point of failure is a corporation or if it's a government there shouldn't be a single point of failure similar choke points existed before the internet if you wanted to deliver a message you'd have to go through one of three television broadcasters or a handful of newspapers private corporations are essential but no critical infrastructure should rely on one or two the internet removed single points of failure in Communications infrastructure and ushered in a wave of competition among New Media corporations building on top of its public rails blockchains can similarly disintermediate critical payments and iot infrastructure the technology is not yet ready to answer all of those questions today but it is our best hope and as with the internet in the 1990s we need a light touch pro-innovation policy to ensure that these Innovations flourish in America for the benefit and security of all Americans and one more clip just to expand on that here is Brian Brooks the former United States acting Comptroller of the currency explain the difference between web 1 web 2 and what cryptocurrency is web 3. so the characteristic of web one if people remember their original AOL account was an ability to look in a curated Walled Garden at a set of content that was not interactive but was presented to you on AOL the way that Time Magazine used to show you the Articles they wanted you to see inside of their magazine just you could see it on a screen the innovation of web 2 was that suddenly you could not only read content but you could also write content this is when the blogosphere became a big thing people remember this from the late 90s the early 2000s and the reason for the centralization of the internet of course was that all of that activity was being monetized by a very small number of companies Facebook is the chairman the chairwoman mentions Google and two or three other companies what makes web 3 different is the ability to own the actual Network and that's what crypto assets themselves represent is an ownership stake in an underlying Network so when you hear people talk about for example layer 1 tokens what they mean is this is your reward for providing The Ledger maintenance services the computing power to the network that on web one and two was done by Google right so now people in my hometown of Pueblo Colorado can actually own the ethereum network but they can't own the internet that's owned by Google and a few other companies that's what the project of crypto is all about is allowing people to directly own the networks that are have native assets that are supporting it and that's the nature of decentralization where the token holders are the people who control the assets okay not the Google token holders for for our language here on the hill those are digital assets right which are the keys to open up the Ledger for you to participate right so describe to us how those those digital assets fit into this internet Revolution web 3.