Cryptocurrency

/biz/ is the crypto containment board, whether we like it or not. However, that does not mean that we need to tolerate people yelling at each other without general understanding of what they are talking about. Any discussion undertaken, and espessialy any financial decisions made, should be done with full knowledge and information. So please, before spending your life savings on magic internet money or shitposting about awful it is and how it's all a scam, please go through all these resources and understand what you are talking about.

What is Bitcoin? How does it work?
Bitcoin is a payment system that is based on the white-paper published by some anonymous person, or a group of them. bitcoin, with the lowercase "b" is the actual cryptocurrency that is based on that white-paper.

A very brief tl;dr on Bitcoin can be watched here, altough it's a bit shilly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc2en3nHxA4

For a much more in-depth explanation, see the Khan Academy section that explains it.

Any dicussion on /biz/ in a cryptocurrency thread ultimately leads to two sides: Obviously both sides are wrong. So that leads us to the question....
 * "Buy now it's about to shoot up it's the currency of the future and will never go down."
 * "Enjoy losing all your money in that ponzi scheme retards bitcoin prices went down 5 minutes ago you better sell everything right now based on that."

More videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4g1XFU8Gto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cexawnOlR8

What drives cryptocurrency prices?
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.0268v1.pdf

- explain the article above, and find more resources to link and discuss-

So who are the biggest owners? Could they crash the market?
The biggest owners of bitcoin are the FBI, the Winklevoss twins, and the person/group that invented it. Large sums of bitcoin are owned by reletively few people, and major selling by these individuals would crash the market. Satoshi Nakamoto has an incredible stash of them, and if there was any trading in his wallet, the price would immediately plummet to nothing as people desperatly tried to get out. Although this all sounds very doom-and-gloomy, Satoshi didn't touch his wallet at the very height of the bubble, when his share was worth over $1 billion, so it's probably safe to say that he is unlikely to sell.

http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-of-the-bitcoins-2013-12 http://www.wired.com/2013/12/fbi_wallet/