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Hi, you're listening to Podlitical, sort of.

This is BBC Scotland's podcast that brings you an inside look at the big stories coming out of Hollywood and Westminster, but it's recess. And while there's obviously plenty going on in politics,

I thought this was a good time to have a look at some other topics too. I'm Phil Sim, I'm a journalist

based in Edinburgh, and today I'm going to be joined by a whole host of people who are going to

help me understand the crypto crash and what might come

next in Scotland and beyond. We've got journalists, podcasters, people from the cutting edge

of business and digital design, and others who are setting up their own currencies. But I have to

admit, while I am technically a digital native millennial who spends the bulk of their time online,

this is one of those fields that makes

me feel quite old. Like when I read about NFTs and stable coins in the Metaverse, it's a bit like

your dad trying to get into TikTok. So we're going to build this thing up from scratch. And I spoke to

BBC Scotland's innovation correspondent Laura Goodwin and asked her to explain crypto to me as if I was a five-year-old.

Cryptocurrency is essentially digital currency. It can be bought and traded kind of like shares,

but you can also use it like money to buy things. Now, 10 years ago, if we were talking about

cryptocurrency, there was just one, and that was Bitcoin. So it was created in 2009 by someone or a group of people,

because we actually don't really know, who go by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, think about

the timing, 2009. What had we just had, Phil? A big financial crash, yeah. A big financial

crash. People had lost faith in the banks and the financial

services. There was a lot of distrust. So what if you could cut out the middleman? What if you

could find a way of sending money sort of peer to peer, cutting out the banks, cutting out governments?

...