Beginner's Guide #4: What is Bitcoin with Stephan Livera - WBD185
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2020
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Location: Skype Date: Tuesday, 14th January Project: The Stephan Livera Podcast Role: Host
Welcome to the Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin can be intimidating for beginners. The protocol is complicated, the community can be aggressive and unforgiving, silly mistakes can lose you money, and it is easy to succumb to altcoin marketing.
Bitcoin does though, offer you the opportunity to hold a new type of monetary asset, one which can't be seized by the government and is censorship resistance and It has the potential to change the way the world.
The goal of What Bitcoin Did has always been about making things simple; there are no stupid questions, and the show is here to help beginners navigate this new world. To kick off 2020, we are launching a special series to help beginners understand Bitcoin. We will be looking at the basics from breaking down the protocol to explaining the economics and discussing the potential societal shift.
Beginners Guide Part 4 - What is Bitcoin with Stephan Livera
Despite being considered a high-risk asset, there are many reasons why people continue to buy Bitcoin. For some, Bitcoin is a speculative tool, for others, it is a means of payment, and for some, it is a hedge against local fiat currency risk and hyperinflation.
It is the unique features of Bitcoin, which is driving adoption, and it is the growth in adoption, which is driving speculation. One key feature of Bitcoin is that it is censorship-resistant, this means that anyone can send anyone else a payment which no third party can block. This was important to Wikileaks when PayPal froze their account and Visa and Mastercard stopped processing payments. Bitcoin became a lifeline for Wikileaks.
The key features of Bitcoin are open to everyone. With a smartphone and an internet connection, anyone can enter this new financial system without requiring permission from the government or an account with a bank. How is this possible? Because Bitcoin is decentralised.
So what makes Bitcoin censorship resistant? What is decentralisation, and why does it matter? And why are trusted third parties security holes?
In Part 4 of The Bitcoin Beginner's Guide, I ask fellow podcaster Stephan Livera, what is Bitcoin? We discuss how Bitcoin works, its key features such as decentralisation and censorship resistance and the reasons why people might want to own it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello there, how are you all? |
| 0:08.0 | Welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast, which is brought to you by The Mighty Cracken, |
| 0:12.0 | the best place to buy sell and |
| 0:14.0 | trade Bitcoin I'm your host Peter McCormack and today I have part four of my |
| 0:18.4 | Bitcoin Beginners guide and I've got an interview with Stephen Livera where he |
| 0:22.4 | answers the question what is |
| 0:24.0 | Bitcoin but before that I do have a message from my show sponsors so firstly today's |
| 0:29.6 | show is brought to you by Drop-bit the only mobile wallet I use for sending and receiving |
| 0:34.4 | Bitcoin. Have you downloaded it yet? Have you tried it out yet? I love the Drop Bit wallet. |
| 0:39.8 | I've been using it now for nearly a year and they delivered on every promise they made. |
| 0:45.2 | They said Pete, drop it, it's a vemmo for Bitcoin. |
| 0:48.3 | It's going to be the easiest way to send and receive Bitcoin with your friends and they did it. They crushed it. They made it so easy. When I first got |
| 0:55.2 | access I could do all the normal shit with addresses and QR codes but they also |
| 0:59.2 | had this ability to text Bitcoin to your friends which is pretty cool but then they brought in the ability to tweet |
| 1:05.1 | Bitcoin to your friends you can literally send Bitcoin via Twitter and I did it I sent |
| 1:10.4 | Donald Trump's and Bitcoin he never claimed it but I did it I managed to send Donald Trump's in Bitcoin. He never claimed it, but I did it. I managed to send Donald Trump some |
| 1:14.6 | Bitcoin. They also added support for the lightning network and they've added the ability to buy |
| 1:19.3 | Bitcoin from within the app. So many things in drop bit. Come on, time to-E, if you do not get it yet, go and check it out. It's available for the iPhone and Android, just head over the Drop-B-I-T-A-T-A-T-A-A-T-A-A-T-A-A-T. And also today's show is brought to you by Kelman Law and now if I get myself |
| 1:35.4 | and some Bitcoin bullshit then these are the guys I'm gonna be calling. |
| 1:38.8 | Kelman is run by two Bitcoin OGs based out of New York and unlike other crypto lawyers you find online |
| 1:45.3 | these guys literally understand Bitcoin and FinTech and of course most importantly |
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