Ten years in bitcoin: from the nerd coin to the "new gold"? | Now

The idea of ​​bitcoin was ten years old this week and at that time, the price of a coin went from almost nothing to $ 20,000 (about 17,500 euros), then dropped considerably. You still can not enter the digital currency, but you can now set your home fries. It is nevertheless a means of payment that still divides strongly. Is this a hype or the future?

It all started with Satoshi Nakamoto, who published this week exactly ten years ago, during the 2008 crisis, a scientific paper on an alternative to our financial system. In short, his idea was to keep transactions on multiple computers at the same time, to create a transparent and anonymous system.

"The blockchain is an online public registry, where everyone can see transactions and where transactions can not be traced." Thousands of computers check every transaction before being recorded in the public register, "says Geert Duijsters, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Tilburg.

" The blockchain is a totally secure, decentralized and for the first time alternative to our current financial system ", says "It's not for nothing that the idea was born in 2008. They did not want to depend anymore on banks, which were not infallible."

Bitcoin was born in early 2009, as the first application of the blockchain, since financial transactions are t kept in many places, it becomes difficult to defraud. After all, you must make the same setting on all millions of computers at the same time. "Only if you hack 51% of computers, you can change something."

From 6,000 to 18,000 dollars (and vice versa)

The question of whether this first cryptomunt is a successful idea, division of sows. Partly because of extreme variations in the exchange rate, critics call the encrypted coin an exaggerated and even dangerous hype.

The price of bitcoin fluctuated around $ 1 at the beginning and did not exceed $ 1,000 until the end of 2013. After the ups and downs, a real craze started in 2017. More media large have also discovered the sharp price increases of crypto-currencies and in December, bitcoin added a value of nearly $ 20,000. Three months later, in February 2018, the value had been divided by more than $ 6,200.

It can not be denied that money is "volatile" (not based on value, nd). Duijsters, as a researcher in technology, nevertheless belongs to the enthusiastic group.

He regards exchange changes as a problem that so far is mainly due to "high expectations". In part because of scarcity (there is a maximum of 21 million available bitcoins that are released over time) will eventually stabilize the value.

Unlike Duijsters, Ivo Arnold. "It's the tenth anniversary of a failure, bitcoin still has not proven itself as a means of payment," he says.

The monetary economist at Nyenrode Business University sees in the weak use of bitcoin by ordinary citizens the failure, and sees mainly risks and dangers instead of benefits.

The ultimate means of payment for criminals

Any of these disadvantages? Transfer anonymous money without the intervention of banks is the dream of criminals. Arnold: "They can get by with the bitcoin, and if it's as anonymous as it says, tax evasion is also made very easy."

Duijsters believes that this criticism is exaggerated. "Bitcoin started as a" nerd coin ", but it had its first success thanks to the crime: it was an ideal way of payment to buy weapons and drugs anonymously" he says. Meanwhile, with the establishment of anonymous markets such as Silk Road, the number of transactions would have been significantly reduced.

"In the meantime, only 0.5% of transactions are" dubious ", of which there remains only a fraction of criminal activity," he says. "Cash is more used than bitcoin for questionable practices, but we will not abolish money because criminals use it a lot?"

Consumption of Energy comparable to that from Denmark

One disadvantage on which friends and foes agree, is that the energy consumption of cryptographic parts is far too high. In 2017, bitcoin consumed the same amount as the whole of Denmark. "Nobody is happy about that," says Duijsters.

Moreover, there is no solution for this enormous ecological footprint. Since all calculations are performed simultaneously on many different computers, extremely high computing power is required. After all, that's exactly what makes the blockchain so safe.

An additional disadvantage is that all computing power slows a transaction into bitcoins. This is not really user friendly.

Therefore, some alternative ciphers do things differently. "They store transactions on fewer computers, making the currency more user-friendly and cost-effective, but also more vulnerable, as hackers can more easily hack a few computers than a few million," says Duijsters.

"Superior to the Internet" [19659009] What should we think about the future of bitcoin? He is "agnostic" about technology, but according to Arnold, we expect nothing from the currency itself. "As an alternative to money, bitcoin can not be taken seriously: the value of money has proven to be very stable despite the crisis, and the ease of payment. 39, use is always greater than that of bitcoin, and crypto is an investment mostly speculative.

Duijsters sees bitcoin, on the other hand, as the new gold. In the future, at least. "Just as people once wore a gold chain to trade in an emergency, they will keep the bitcoin in their hands, which is already happening in countries where their own currency is subject to extreme inflation, such as Venezuela. "

Duijsters sees a lot in the underlying technology. "The blockchain is still in its infancy and will have more important effects than the Internet," he says.

"I compare the state of the blockchain to the Internet in the early 90s, when the main application was the email, and it was said: if everyone starts to the use, things will go wrong, and we could not predict where we are now. "