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Our final story tonight takes you back to around a decade ago, when the digital currency "bitcoin", the world's first ever decentralised digital currency, was put into use.
As El Salvador recently adopted bitcoin as its legal tender, does that mean bitcoin is capable of becoming one of the world's major currencies?
Here's that story.
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What is bitcoin?
The quintessence of cryptocurrency, bitcoin is the world's first-ever decentralised digital currency, better known as cryptocurrency.
Digital currency wasn't commonplace at first, and it was not deemed reliable. Furthermore, as it wasn't used worldwide in the beginning, people's two cents about bitcoin were of little account.
This paradigm-shifting technology allows people to cut out the middleman, as bitcoins can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network, without the need for intermediaries, and is independent of central control.
Bitcoins are stored in a digital wallet on a computer or mobile phone.
A number of currency exchanges, which enables the buying and selling of bitcoins for U.S. dollars, euros and more, are available.
Secured by miners, the interconnected bitcoin network gives miners newly-generated bitcoins after verifying transactions. Transactions are subsequently recorded in a transparent public ledger. That is, utilising our semantic knowledge, a set of records stored on bitcoin's servers.
As of 2017, more than 2.9 million unique users had already started using a cryptocurrency wallet, with most of them using bitcoin, which stands to reason why bitcoin has started to become commonplace.
The pseudonymous creator of bitcoin is known as Satoshi Nakamoto.
The fallout of a Japanese-American man, who had been thought to be bitcoin's creator, denying his involvement with the digital currency, was immense. As such, Dorian Nakamoto sued Newsweek, an American weekly news magazine, for being disingenuous.
While people have been literally none the wiser as to who invented the out-of-nowhere technology, one Central American country recently adopted Bitcoin as legal tender.
It was El Salvador, which blazed a trail in cryptocurrency.
Unexpectedly, the rollout last Tuesday got off to a bad start. Teething problems which beset the rollout elicited negative responses, as more than 1,000 people took to the streets in El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, downright furious and irate. They cast doubt on the cryptocurrency, believing bitcoin cannot measure up to conventional currencies.
Here's the unacceptable face of bitcoin:
Bitcoin has been utilised by thieves and tech-savvy people to dupe those who don't know the first thing about cryptocurrency, or have been steering clear of learning more about what's behind bitcoin's complicated system, into giving them bitcoins.
Statistics tell no lies. As of December 2017, some 980,000 bitcoins have been stolen from cryptocurrency exchanges by way of phishing, scamming and hacking.
Bitcoin's environmental impact and carbon footprint have sparked widespread criticisms, given the gargantuan amount of energy needed for mining.
Its ever-changing value also keeps bitcoin users and investors on pins and needles, as, all the time, they haven't a clue about fluctuations in its price.
In the end, is bitcoin a boon or a bane to us?
Well, it remains to be seen.
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