On May 31, 2011, I was invited by Russia Today's Keiser Report to discuss bitcoin, the decentralized cryptocurrency:
For further reading:
"Rough Trades: Digital Derivatives Hit the Bitcoin Markets as Wall Street Bankers Take Interest", Adrianne Jeffries, August 2, 2011
"Want to Short Bitcoin? Derivatives Trading ‘Coming Soon,’ Say Exchanges", Adrianne Jeffries, July 25, 2011
"New digital money and transaction system may be the wave of the future", Kenneth Schortgen, June 5, 2011
"Bitcoin vs. Central Bankers", Subrealism, June 2, 2011
I know that media slice and dice interviews to make them fit the available time, what the interviewer wants to convey, etc. And I know that this was from a few months ago now (just recently (re-)released on the RSS feed), so there's been time to improve the presentation. But I think a better elevator pitch is needed for everyone involved in Bitcoin. It is a big and very technical subject, yes, but too many people try to cover too much ground too fast and leave the hearer thinking "I don't know what you're talking about". When people ask, "What is Bitcoin", I think we should (almost?) always start from the powerful metaphor of how physical gold was mined and minted as coins, and smoothly map that into the cash-over-the-Internet idea. That enables the hearer to easily understand the key characteristics of: limited supply released over time; transactions from person to person without any (required) intermediaries; anonymous (well, more or less) transactions; supply (and thus, value) not subject to government manipulation; etc. All the technical details about cryptography/"puzzles", the block chain, etc. can wait until after the hearer grasps the overall basic ideas above. Bringing those in too soon will just confuse the hearer.
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