Most people have heard of Bitcoin and maybe that it was created in the wake of the financial crisis that started around 2007.

Bitcoin is now 12 years old, but it didn’t get much visibility (perhaps notoriety) until after 2013. The name Bitcoin is unfortunate as it gives the idea that there is a physical manifestation of the technology. However, as no better name was found everyone uses coins.

In the meantime the idea of basing value on the security of the blockchain spawned a multitude of other coins, like Etherium and Ripple. Bitcoin was seen to be insufficiently flexible to be used for contracts, so Etherium includes a form of programming that allows for “smart contracts”.

The existence of smart contracts has in turn spawned a large number of Tokens, which are payment transfers built on the Etherium blockchain using smart contract possibilites.

The number of new tokens expanded dramatically since the first bitcoin frenzy in 2017 and there are now over 5,000 of them. As the transfer of value on the blockchain requires keeping track of large numbers, there are now a multitude of software wallets make it easy to store and transfer crypto currencies. At the same time, there are a number of exchanges that are used as market-places to trade crypto.

Each of the paragraphs above gives just an idea of the subject matter, something that needs to be studied in depth just to get a feel of what crypto really is.

I often get asked how it can be real if it is just a string of numbers stored on a computer. Answering the question means studying the history of non-crypto currencies first and realising that even the “normal” currency that you have in your account is also only a string of numbers. The hardest point to understand is often that there is no central authority for Bitcoin, it is controlled by many thousands of computers around the world, all competing to maintain the system.

The real strength of Bitcoin is that there is no central authority and therefore no one to create inflation or to simply take money from your account.