Win bitcoinwith a number sequence how to win $120 2017

And this started on the very first day. On the very first day, there was zero bitcoin in the world. And after 10 minutes - after about 10 minutes, 50 bitcoin were released to one of the computers that was hooked into the network, which at that point was Satoshi Nakamoto's computers. They were almost the only computers that were hooked in at that point. But the rules of bitcoin - the software determine how those bitcoins, those new bitcoins being released, are going to be distributed to people.

And the first thing that this does is that it encourages people to join the network. You can essentially - at least early on, you could essentially get free bitcoin if you joined the network. And so it incentivized people to join the network. The other thing it did was that it got those computers to start keeping the records for the network. So if you want to win those bitcoins, essentially you have to start working as an accountant for the network and registering all the new transactions that come in.

And if you are doing that - the more computers you add to help, you know, serve as accountant for the network, the better chance you have of winning bitcoins. And so that is how sort of the records are kept, and that's how you get people to volunteer to keep the records. You give them new bitcoins. You offer these new bitcoins. So over time, that incentive system has generated this enormous network. Right now, there's something like 13, nodes or computers hooked into the network that are helping to keep these records.

And a lot of those are mining, trying to win these new bitcoins. And so this complicated economic system was set up with lots of incentives in there to get people to participate and to sort of create the foundation for this decentralized network to keep all the records. So you can't just say, well, I want to create new bitcoin. It's a kind of interesting process. You're basically competing with other people who also want to create new bitcoin. So what do you have? Do you have, like, a lot of computers competing with each other?

And what's the competition? Like, what are the Let's make sure not to go too deep data because it's based on cryptography and encryption, which is sort of the leading edge of math, you know, basically really hard math problems you have to solve. But at the most basic, computers are trying to process all the transactions coming into the bitcoin network as quickly as possible. And the faster you do it, the more efficiently you do it, the better chance you have of winning bitcoin.

There's an element of luck in it. It's somewhat like a lottery, but essentially the person with the most computing power has the best chance of winning the lottery. And so what's that - what that's created today is a world in which you have literally server farms in outer - inner Mongolia, in Tibet, in Iceland. Anywhere where you can get cheap electricity to run computers very fast, people have set up basically server farms, big, you know, buildings just filled with computers trying to sort of unlock these new bitcoins but also sort of serving as the backbone of this network.

And, you know, the more computers you have joined in, the more secure the network is, the harder it is to attack. And it's this crazy world in which - I mean, literally in China, which has become one of the most, you know, one of the places where you have the most bitcoin mining, you know, spread all around China, you have next to - you know, next to hydroelectric dams and next to a coal plants, people have set up these server farms that are dedicated to doing nothing but mining bitcoin.

I went a couple years ago to one in China. They have gotten a lot bigger and more sophisticated since then.

I mean, there are literally sort of towns that are built around this in China where you have people just living in the bitcoin mining facility, you know, Chinese people who really - you know, the people who are working there are sort of the custodians. They - most of them have no idea really what's going on or how the system works.

But it's - you know, it's created this whole economy. So bitcoin is being used as an investment vehicle in the U. It's being used for investing, in speculation. How is that playing out here? Well, very well for the people who bought it early on. And that has attracted a whole bunch of new people to this. It's attracted people around the world.

Here, what you've seen is a lot of hedge funds getting into this game. So there are now hedge funds being set up. Something like hedge funds in the last year have been set up to invest exclusively in virtual currencies, bitcoin as well as some of the competitors that have sprung up.

Well, say this is a bubble, what happens laughter? I mean, like, the price of bitcoin has been shooting straight up, but things that go up sometimes come back down. I mean, if you look at the chart of the bitcoin price since it was born, it is just a series of spikes and then drops, and then spikes and then drops.

And over time, you know, you get the spike, and it drops down to a level that is generally still higher than where it was before the spike, but lower than the spike.

And so I think a lot of people are asking right now how long this can go on. And certainly, you've heard numerous CEOs of banks say, this is unsustainable; this is a bubble; this is going to crash. And I think there's no doubt that there probably is going to be some reckoning here.

I mean, this meets many of the definitions of a bubble. People are speculating on the future value and desire for bitcoin.

People are speculating that this will serve more purposes in the future and will be more valuable to more people in the future than it is today. And they're betting - a lot of people are just betting that the price is going to go up without knowing anything about it. And those are a lot of the characteristics that you see in bubbles.

I mean, you know, the counterargument is that this is the first time that we've had a scarce digital resource. So I - the Internet, until now - most things on the Internet, you can copy and paste, right?

So a lot of people think about this now as something like digital gold. You know, this is a place where you can keep your money because there's only going to be so many of them, and the system works, and it's in some ways better than gold because, you know, gold, you can't carry across a border secretly.

So that's the sort of thesis on this. But I think that the sort of expectations and the types of people who are getting into this right now, a lot of them are not terribly sophisticated. So of the maximum 21 million bitcoin that can be released by - what were - year was it, ? We're getting close to 17 million. So the reward to people who are helping to support the network falls in half every four years.

OK, it's time for a short break. Let me reintroduce you. My guest is Nathaniel Popper. We're talking about bitcoin, and he's been writing about bitcoin for several years. He's a tech reporter for The New York Times who wrote a book a couple of years ago about bitcoin called "Digital Gold. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Nathaniel Popper. He's a tech reporter at The New York Times. And we're talking about bitcoin - digital currency - and he's been covering bitcoin for several years.

A couple of years ago, he wrote a book about it called "Digital Gold. So, you know, whether you use bitcoin or not, whether you think it's going to last or not, the architecture of the system seems pretty ingenious. And there are major banks and even the New York Stock Exchange, you know, that are picking up on some of the architecture to borrow it for their own purposes, and what they're borrowing from is what's called the blockchain.

Would you explain what that is and how, like, major banks are trying to borrow that system? Well, I think the blockchain, in the simplest sense, is the record of all the bitcoin transactions. It's a ledger, a sort of a spreadsheet on which bitcoin transactions are recorded. But what's special about the bitcoin ledger - the bitcoin blockchain - is that it's not kept by a central institution. It's kept by a bunch of people, and part of the idea is that it's a bunch of people who don't trust each other but can use this system to have a sort of shared record of their assets.

And so this blockchain idea, this idea of keeping records in a decentralized way so that anybody can consult it and that nobody is in charge - that idea of the blockchain is something that's piqued a lot of interest in the financial industry but also in a whole bunch of other industries.

IBM has made this one of their biggest pushes over the last few years to kind of try to regain relevance. They have made a big move into the blockchain industry, as has Microsoft. And they're essentially making a bet that this is a new way to track information. And, you know, we live in an information economy, and so if you can come up with new ways to track and store information more reliably, it has the potential to recreate some of the foundations of the information economy.

It really sounds rather vague. You know, when you just look at something like the financial industry, the banks are looking at this as, you know - maybe instead of paying the New York Stock Exchange to buy and sell stocks there, and then transfer the money for us, and move the stocks back and forth and make sure all the records are kept, maybe we - all the banks - we can just set up a blockchain where we can all trade, and we don't have to pay anybody in the middle, and we can keep track of all those records, and all of us can do it without trusting any of the other people in the system.

And that's the sort of basic idea that I think has given rise to this whole new industry. So you're not allowed to invest in bitcoin because you cover it for The New York Times. Are you allowed to use it, and have you used it? I mean, our take at The New York Times has basically been, I can have enough to play with and understand it. And I think the understanding has generally been that, you know, those bitcoins essentially belong to The New York Times so that I don't get any big ideas.

But yeah, I mean, I'm in there on a daily basis trying to understand how these things work, how you move between different currencies, how it can move around the world. And that's been an important part of reporting on this. Well, companies - not surprisingly, companies have sprung up to make this very easy for you to take your money and give you bitcoin.

You know, there's - probably the biggest company in the United States is a company called Coinbase, which is essentially a sort of Charles Schwab or an E-Trade for bitcoin. You send them money, and then you can trade on their platform. You can move in and out of bitcoin. And then you can take your money out and transfer it back to your bank. And they've made it very easy so that anybody - you know, so it's as easy as - probably easier than buying a stock is through E-Trade.

And part of what's interesting there - I guess that's not too surprising. What's interesting is that the government and regulators have essentially allowed this to happen, have said, this is OK. New York - state of New York has created a BitLicense that Coinbase has, and that makes it easier for them to do this and easier to get bank accounts.

And so at least in the United States, the government has sort of said, we're going to let this happen; we realize there might be something of value here, so we're not going to try to kill this. Have you had any great bitcoin adventures in researching your book or writing for The New York Times that you could share for - share with us?

I mean, this whole thing has been such an incredible story. I mean, that's why I was drawn to it. I mean, the number of people who have gone to jail - often shortly after getting fabulously wealthy - is incredible.

And so a lot of the stories I talk - tell in my book are these stories of these astronomic rises followed by these incredible falls. And oftentimes, I was there. You know, I - you know, one of the main characters in my book, I met him in this bar that he had essentially bought a piece of using bitcoin and where he would have these bitcoin parties, where he met his girlfriend. You know, they took bitcoin for - the waiters and waitresses took bitcoin. And he was on top of the world.

He had just come back from Argentina. He was traveling around. A week later, he got stopped at the airport by the police, went to trial, ended up in jail.

And, you know, I was talking to him at every stage along the way. And I've had that experience in so many different realms - you know, in Iceland, in China, in Argentina. And just to see the way that this technology has created these little universes of - it's only - they're like little science fiction cells where these people are imagining these new futures, and, you know, in each place - in China, Argentina, everywhere you go - it has evolved in different ways.

And so just to see the way that this software, you know, it - that this piece of program that this anonymous person wrote - the way it can sprout up and create all these things in the real world - you know, going to these gorges in China where there are now people just living in these enormous industrial sites, working on this - it's - that's, I think, what's been the most incredible to see.

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Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email. November 9, 2: Heard on Fresh Air. So just give us a sense of the scope. Like, how much money is invested in bitcoin now?

So what is a bitcoin? So was it created to solve certain problems with money as we know it? I mean, that's been a big thing that's risen up in the last two years, and That's a good way of putting it. I don't even know it's a he, right?

Who decides who wins? You know, we're slipping down the rabbit hole here and I Yeah, that's what I was afraid of, but Let's make sure not to go I know you visited a server farm in Iceland. Did you go to one in China, too? We got a while. So would you just tell us a little bit, like, in a comprehensive way about how new bitcoin is mined?

It's a dangerous question, and it's a hard one to answer simply, but, you know, the answer to how bitcoin are created does sort of give you some glimpse into the inner workings of how this thing functions and why it has survived as long as it has.

I mean, essentially, bitcoin released onto the network every 10 minutes. A new block of bitcoin is released onto the network every 10 minutes. And this started on the very first day. On the very first day, there was zero bitcoin in the world. And after 10 minutes - after about 10 minutes, 50 bitcoin were released to one of the computers that was hooked into the network, which at that point was Satoshi Nakamoto's computers. They were almost the only computers that were hooked in at that point.

But the rules of bitcoin - the software determine how those bitcoins, those new bitcoins being released, are going to be distributed to people. And the first thing that this does is that it encourages people to join the network. You can essentially - at least early on, you could essentially get free bitcoin if you joined the network. And so it incentivized people to join the network. The other thing it did was that it got those computers to start keeping the records for the network.

So if you want to win those bitcoins, essentially you have to start working as an accountant for the network and registering all the new transactions that come in. And if you are doing that - the more computers you add to help, you know, serve as accountant for the network, the better chance you have of winning bitcoins.

And so that is how sort of the records are kept, and that's how you get people to volunteer to keep the records. You give them new bitcoins. You offer these new bitcoins. So over time, that incentive system has generated this enormous network. Right now, there's something like 13, nodes or computers hooked into the network that are helping to keep these records. And a lot of those are mining, trying to win these new bitcoins. And so this complicated economic system was set up with lots of incentives in there to get people to participate and to sort of create the foundation for this decentralized network to keep all the records.

So you can't just say, well, I want to create new bitcoin. It's a kind of interesting process. You're basically competing with other people who also want to create new bitcoin. So what do you have? Do you have, like, a lot of computers competing with each other? And what's the competition? Like, what are the Let's make sure not to go too deep data because it's based on cryptography and encryption, which is sort of the leading edge of math, you know, basically really hard math problems you have to solve.

But at the most basic, computers are trying to process all the transactions coming into the bitcoin network as quickly as possible. And the faster you do it, the more efficiently you do it, the better chance you have of winning bitcoin. There's an element of luck in it. It's somewhat like a lottery, but essentially the person with the most computing power has the best chance of winning the lottery. And so what's that - what that's created today is a world in which you have literally server farms in outer - inner Mongolia, in Tibet, in Iceland.

Anywhere where you can get cheap electricity to run computers very fast, people have set up basically server farms, big, you know, buildings just filled with computers trying to sort of unlock these new bitcoins but also sort of serving as the backbone of this network.

I went a couple years ago to one in China. They have gotten a lot bigger and more sophisticated since then. I mean, there are literally sort of towns that are built around this in China where you have people just living in the bitcoin mining facility, you know, Chinese people who really - you know, the people who are working there are sort of the custodians.

They - most of them have no idea really what's going on or how the system works. But it's - you know, it's created this whole economy. So bitcoin is being used as an investment vehicle in the U. It's being used for investing, in speculation. How is that playing out here? Well, very well for the people who bought it early on. And that has attracted a whole bunch of new people to this. It's attracted people around the world. Here, what you've seen is a lot of hedge funds getting into this game.

So there are now hedge funds being set up. Something like hedge funds in the last year have been set up to invest exclusively in virtual currencies, bitcoin as well as some of the competitors that have sprung up. Well, say this is a bubble, what happens laughter? I mean, like, the price of bitcoin has been shooting straight up, but things that go up sometimes come back down.

I mean, if you look at the chart of the bitcoin price since it was born, it is just a series of spikes and then drops, and then spikes and then drops. And over time, you know, you get the spike, and it drops down to a level that is generally still higher than where it was before the spike, but lower than the spike. And so I think a lot of people are asking right now how long this can go on. And certainly, you've heard numerous CEOs of banks say, this is unsustainable; this is a bubble; this is going to crash.

And I think there's no doubt that there probably is going to be some reckoning here. I mean, this meets many of the definitions of a bubble. People are speculating on the future value and desire for bitcoin. People are speculating that this will serve more purposes in the future and will be more valuable to more people in the future than it is today.

And they're betting - a lot of people are just betting that the price is going to go up without knowing anything about it.

And those are a lot of the characteristics that you see in bubbles. I mean, you know, the counterargument is that this is the first time that we've had a scarce digital resource. So I - the Internet, until now - most things on the Internet, you can copy and paste, right?

That's what the music industry found. You can copy and paste an MP3. You can copy and paste a movie file. Things aren't scarce on the Internet, and one of the things that bitcoin did through this weird, complicated system of incentives is, it created a scarce digital asset for the first time. So a lot of people think about this now as something like digital gold. You know, this is a place where you can keep your money because there's only going to be so many of them, and the system works, and it's in some ways better than gold because, you know, gold, you can't carry across a border secretly.

You can't - you can try to stuff it in your underwear. But, you know, gold, people can - it's hard to travel with gold. Bitcoin - as long as you have that password, you can go somewhere else with internet access and you have access to your money. So that's the sort of thesis on this. But I think that the sort of expectations and the types of people who are getting into this right now, a lot of them are not terribly sophisticated.

So of the maximum 21 million bitcoin that can be released by - what were - year was it, ? We're getting close to 17 million. So the reward to people who are helping to support the network falls in half every four years.

And if you're just joining us, my guest is Nathaniel Popper. He's a tech reporter at The New York Times. And we're talking about bitcoin - digital currency - and he's been covering bitcoin for several years.

It's kept by a bunch of people, and part of the idea is that it's a bunch of people who don't trust each other but can use this system to have a sort of shared record of their assets. And so this blockchain idea, this idea of keeping records in a decentralized way so that anybody can consult it and that nobody is in charge - that idea of the blockchain is something that's piqued a lot of interest in the financial industry but also in a whole bunch of other industries.

And that's the sort of basic idea that I think has given rise to this whole new industry. So you're not allowed to invest in bitcoin because you cover it for The New York Times.

Are you allowed to use it, and have you used it? I mean, our take at The New York Times has basically been, I can have enough to play with and understand it. And I think the understanding has generally been that, you know, those bitcoins essentially belong to The New York Times so that I don't get any big ideas.

But yeah, I mean, I'm in there on a daily basis trying to understand how these things work, how you move between different currencies, how it can move around the world.

And that's been an important part of reporting on this. Well, companies - not surprisingly, companies have sprung up to make this very easy for you to take your money and give you bitcoin.

I mean, the number of people who have gone to jail - often shortly after getting fabulously wealthy - is incredible. And so a lot of the stories I talk - tell in my book are these stories of these astronomic rises followed by these incredible falls. And oftentimes, I was there. You know, I - you know, one of the main characters in my book, I met him in this bar that he had essentially bought a piece of using bitcoin and where he would have these bitcoin parties, where he met his girlfriend.

You know, they took bitcoin for - the waiters and waitresses took bitcoin. And he was on top of the world. He had just come back from Argentina. He was traveling around. A week later, he got stopped at the airport by the police, went to trial, ended up in jail.

And, you know, I was talking to him at every stage along the way. And I've had that experience in so many different realms - you know, in Iceland, in China, in Argentina.

And just to see the way that this technology has created these little universes of - it's only - they're like little science fiction cells where these people are imagining these new futures, and, you know, in each place - in China, Argentina, everywhere you go - it has evolved in different ways. And so just to see the way that this software, you know, it - that this piece of program that this anonymous person wrote - the way it can sprout up and create all these things in the real world - you know, going to these gorges in China where there are now people just living in these enormous industrial sites, working on this - it's - that's, I think, what's been the most incredible to see.

Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email. November 9, 2: Heard on Fresh Air. So just give us a sense of the scope. Like, how much money is invested in bitcoin now? So what is a bitcoin? So was it created to solve certain problems with money as we know it? I mean, that's been a big thing that's risen up in the last two years, and That's a good way of putting it.

I don't even know it's a he, right? Who decides who wins? You know, we're slipping down the rabbit hole here and I Yeah, that's what I was afraid of, but

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