The following was an email that sent to a good friend of mine who was asking about bitcoin and wanted to know my thoughts. What resulted was this thought vomit.. with videos.

I’ve put together a list of video clips and articles that over the last 12 months have helped me answer some questions about where I think the future of bitcoin is heading.

Excuse me if I repeat myself here or tell you things you already know, I just need a stream of consciousness, to set what I know down in words.

When I first started investigating bitcoin it certainly felt a lot like a scam. Everywhere I looked for information, video and articles seemed to be full of either extravagant ‘get rich quick’ guarantees or negative stories, like that of Mt Gox and Silk Road. On the surface it seemed weird and pretty unbelievable. To be honest I probably jumped in a little under prepared, but as soon as I came to my senses about it I found that the only mistake that I’d actually made was paying too much attention to mainstream hype and not enough to what was really going on. Which turns out to be a real revolution, and not just one spearheaded by lefty, liberal anarchists like myself, but one that is a real agenda at boardroom tables in the chambers of power, the Bank of England, Goldman Sacks, Visa, Virgin, and financial institutions across the globe. But most encouraging for me is that the core developers and startup pioneers are exactly the same people that created the internet boom and gave us what we have today. By all accounts Silicon Valley and its counterparts around the world are primarily focused on two things, the Internet Of Things (IoT) and the Blockchain. And it is the opinion of many leading experts that we cannot have one without the other. The Blockchain is already being labeled as the internet 2.0

Bitcoin is merely the currency of the blockchain and is needed for the blockchain to do its job, in short it is a currency that is valued by the thousands, soon the be hundreds of thousands, (if not millions) of nodes participating world wide. It is rumoured that the current blockchain network is already 500 times bigger than any other super computer system out there.

This first video is my favourite for explaining in understandable terms what exactly it’s all about..

The most important theme to take from this video is that each and every bitcoin (BTC) is divisible 100,000,000 times (the smallest divisible fragment of a bitcoin, 0.00000001, has been labeled a ‘Satoshi’ after Satoshi Nakamoto, which I’ll try and cover later on), this means within each BTC there is 100,000,000 (100 million) opportunities to digital lock in information of any kind, whether that be one person one vote or the deeds to a property, or even a Will. And there is 2 elements to this that I find fascinating. The first is that we will no longer need a third parties to facilitate an exchange of currency or a Will, or anything. I could leave everything to Aga or my niblings or to you, simply by putting that Will into a Satoshi and releasing it onto the blockchain, only to be reclaimed using a unique digital key. The second exciting element is that each unique digital key could be time locked or event activated. For example:

Imagine we’re of an age where the IoT is a reality. I want to leave you the rights to my vinyl collection after my sad and tragic demise. 🙂 First I would put that information tagged onto a Satoshi, give it my individual signature, lock it at my address and label it as event activated, and release it to the blockchain pointed at your address which is:

3J98t1WpEZ73CNmQviEXAMPLEiWrnqRhWNLy to be delivered after my death…

Life goes on as normal, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt and indeed I get ravished to death by a party of mid 20s Indonesian beauties sent to punish me for my crimes against humanity. It’s terrible, I literally get sexed to death at the upsettingly young age of 104.

An ambulance crew turn up and I am pronounced dead at the scene, which sets off a chain reaction on the blockchain and does many things like inform the local registry office, my friends and family and tells the Blockchain to deliver all of my event activated Satoshis. Almost instantly you become to legal owner of my record collection and you are notified by an app on your phone. No middleman. No third party. No cost.

Ok, I get carried away, but the idea of ownership and cutting out the middleman is the point and is very much becoming a reality, illustrated best by no other then BBC’s technology programme, Click, this very week. Jump to 02.36 in this video here (or watch it all – it’s worth it, Click is awesome)

This video might not work outside of the UK or after a certain date.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06qjwmn/click-28112015

Decentralisation is the one thing that is making the security of the blockchain the key subject for everybody, including within the financial institutes, Visa is already testing the system to secure against fraud. The Bank of England is employing interns based on a candidates knowledge of the blockchain. Behind closed doors, the banks are discussing the technology with great enthusiasm, this article here is a great read:

http://www.afr.com/business/banking-and-finance/bitcoins-journey-from-money-laundering-appeal-to-teaching-the-banks-20151126-gl9gup

As I mentioned, until you delve into this it’s hard to see past the negative stories, and I can easily see why public adoption has been a slow process. At the moment the public see it as an experimental thing, people don’t see the potential. Most people don’t understand the connection between Bitcoin and the blockchain. In fact people have no idea what the blockchain is, and for the best part they never will, it’ll be the underlying technology that will change their lives, just like TCP/IP or HTTP or HTML does today. Anyone that has an inkling of BTC currently sees it as monopoly money for the internet, but I am more than certain this will change. And when it does I plan to be ahead of the game, clued up and ready to answer questions. Here’s a good video of how public adoption of Facebook and Twitter changed the lives of share holders and users alike..

I could do this all day, the amount of data I have shifted through over the past 12 months has resulted in me doing more research into BTC and the Blockchain than any other subject I have ever been interested in. I’ve sat through, webinars, I’ve dabbled in trading, investigated buying shares in blockchain startup, chatted with economist, watched a lot of the negative and positive videos, read the articles as well as Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, which is here. I find it hard to grasp, but I don’t have a masters in computer science. What I do have is trust in the open source nature of it all and the collective mastery of computer scientists. This is happening, whether we’re on board or not. The sooner we’re part of it the more future proofed we’ll be. Here’s a documentary to show how it’s picking up pace.

Finally for now, Wallets, there are many many out there, some more trusted than others. I use cold storage for the majority of my holdings and coinbase.com for day to day coins, mostly because they seem to be the most reputable amongst the community, you can buy BTC with a credit card or by bank transfer. I also have a preferred exchange but I’ll cover this at a later date. If you use my referral, below, to buy in we’d both earn ourselves £10 worth of coin.

This is true for you blog readers too. 🙂

https://www.coinbase.com/join/EMiBias

Much love. x

Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far I appreciate your interest. If you wish to donate bitcoin please use the address below. If you have any questions please feel free to ask. I can’t promise to have all the answers, but I might know someone who does.

16RH55R7eYU4ExPEjEWx9jv7UqHQ1KJLXY