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I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

In 2008, a team of coders decided they would declare financial independence from a struggling central bank system in the midst of a recession.

They put their computing knowledge to the test and soon Bitcoin was born.

The cryptocurrency movement quickly evolved from its humble beginnings and transformed into a mainstream global phenomenon.

Today, Bitcoin is still the most valuable selling for around $60,000 a pop at last check. That's up from just a few cents of coin back when it launched.

Even though cryptocurrency is catching on in the mainstream, the world surrounding it is still confusing to millions of consumers.

We've got a lot to learn about how cryptocurrency operates and whether it can be sustained in the long term.

For more on this, I'm joined by Jean-Volpecelli. He is a journalist at WiredUK and author of cryptocurrency. How digital money could transform finance.

We'll talk about cryptocurrencies popularity around the world and where it's going from here. That's all coming up next.

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Jean-Volpecelli, welcome to Business Wars.

Thank you there before having me. How are you doing?

I am fine very interesting writing that you've done on this subject cryptocurrency I think is safe to say can be rather cryptic to the average listener and layman's terms how does this stuff work?

Well, I mean the idea was to create a sort of digital cash system right so blending the digital elements or systems like visa for instance so the quickness and the online element of those kind of networks with the immediacy of cash which meant in this case essentially to remove all middlemen all intermediaries.

Every single company like a bank or a payment company like visa itself and replace it with a decentralized network of computers.

Nine of which was in charge of validating this transaction but all of them in a way collectively did it.

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