Dude, Where's My Bitcoin? Tales of Real People Dealing With a Virtual Currency
Note to Self
WNYC Studios
4.7 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2013
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bitcoins. Bitcoins. Bitcoins. These days, you can’t swing a digital cat without reading a story about the digital currency that’s got tech and financial reporters all in a froth. It’s complicated (though h/t to Quartz and its explanation about how it all works) and at times, hard to figure out how to make it relevant to everyone else. That is until I heard two stories about bitcoin that make up this week’s New Tech City. First, there’s Gina Fox, a self-described "old mom" from Rhinebeck, New York, who misplaced as many as 100 bitcoins. So you know, in real life dollars, that could be worth about $100,000. Can she find them? Then, the second story, bitcoin goes locally-sourced near the organic aisle at a Whole Foods (and not in Brooklyn…yet…). Where bitcoin dealers meet for some face to face trading. Slightly odd considering it’s a virtual currency.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Manoosh. Come take a little walk with me. Okay, so we are walking basically from |
| 0:08.9 | my desk about a hundred yards to the man who signs my checks. Just tell me your names |
| 0:14.8 | I can get level here. My name is Jim Shafter. And Jim, what do you do here at WNYC? I'm |
| 0:21.1 | the vice president for news. Manoosh, I'm your boss. Oh yeah, you are. So question for you, |
| 0:27.0 | back before you had a big important job like this, I understand that you were a collector |
| 0:32.0 | of sorts. Well, yes, I was a stamp collector. My mom and dad, my mom primarily was a collector |
| 0:38.0 | of blue chip stamps. Okay, so Jim is a man as he, these are his words, not mine. He's a man |
| 0:43.5 | of a certain age and when he was growing up as a kid in Los Angeles, he went to the grocery |
| 0:47.4 | store, you checked out and you got, depending on the store, either blue chip stamps or SNH |
| 0:53.3 | green stamps as like a premium. They had no cash value, but you took those stamps, he |
| 0:58.8 | pasted them into little books. And when you had enough books, you could go to the blue chip |
| 1:02.7 | stamp redemption store and get a toaster or golf clubs. Okay, so decades ago, the Shafter |
| 1:09.1 | family was into blue chip stamps. What could we possibly compare them to today? Bitcoin, |
| 1:16.8 | which is essentially digital cash, is starting to be taken seriously. Okay, I know you've heard |
| 1:22.2 | this a million times by now. Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, two or three years ago, few of us |
| 1:27.5 | had heard of them. Now we hear about the virtual currency freaking everywhere. It's like every |
| 1:33.2 | tech or finance journalist feels like they have to cover it. The value of each Bitcoin |
| 1:38.4 | hit a new high. There are about eight, nine federal agencies that all touch Bitcoin in |
| 1:43.0 | some sort of way. Websites are popping up that allow people to gamble with Bitcoin. |
| 1:47.7 | And just a reminder, in case you tuned out all those times, a Bitcoin story popped up |
| 1:51.8 | on TV or the radio, its digital money made up of strings of code not issued by the government. |
| 1:58.3 | It also was designed to be untraceable and anonymous, so it would never be crushed under |
... |
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