Читать книгу Bitcoin For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 11

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering the history of digital currency

Finding out about early Bitcoin and its creator

Understanding what money (and Bitcoin) is and is not

Exploring the benefits of Bitcoin

For a mere teenager, the Bitcoin network has certainly had a big impact on the world, transacting more than US$12.4T in 2021 alone. As we write these words, Bitcoin has a market capitalization (total value) of $918,705,395,133, which is almost a trillion dollars. (The market cap is the total number of Bitcoins in “circulation” multiplied by the current market price of a single Bitcoin.)

But that’s a current low price; just a few weeks prior, it had a combined value of almost 1.3 trillion dollars. By the time you read this, the value may be higher, lower, or the same. That’s one of the things about Bitcoin: Its market price can be very volatile, as you’ll soon learn if you spend a little time watching the markets.

But the impact we’re talking about is not just referring to Bitcoin’s current market value. In fact, the market cap of Apple, Inc. is more than three times that of the Bitcoin network. However, a comparison with Apple might be apropos right now. Figure 1-1 shows how much Bitcoin would be needed to buy a single share of Apple stock, from 2010 through 2021. The value of a single Bitcoin has been increasing against the Apple stock (just as it has, of course, against the U.S. dollar and other governmental currencies).

FIGURE 1-1: How much Bitcoin is needed to buy a share of Apple?

The launch of Bitcoin set off a revolution in blockchain and cryptocurrency. There are now more than 13,000 different cryptocurrencies. (Most, be warned, are essentially valueless and will remain that way.) At the time of writing, the top five cryptocurrencies have a combined market cap of almost 1.7 trillion dollars, and a number of cryptocurrencies have genuinely useful functions beyond merely being used as money or a store of value. It’s likely that some of these cryptocurrencies will endure, even if most won’t.

But we’re here to talk about Bitcoin, so let’s begin with a little history. Where did Bitcoin come from, and how did it develop?