Well hello financial scholars it's me your hapless professor Gabby

Dunn just kidding you guys I am nowhere near a professor on this week's episode

you'll hear me actually ask someone what money is don't laugh could you

really answer that question what's money right exactly I didn't think so

anyway this week we're examining another value system that we just made up

out of thin air crypto currency please don't turn it off please don't turn it off

if you think the dollars and cents we carry around in our pockets or wallets all

the time are when you think about it kind of meaningless cryptocurrency might

be even more absurd but please bear with me in case you're new to this whole

phenomenon or have just been avoiding any news article with Bitcoin in the

headline here's a basic primer

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency lidah which means there's a level of cryptography

involved it's decentralized so it isn't owned or regulated by any one company

and there's a finite amount of it so in that sense it's kind of like gold and

actually the metaphor goes even further because one way to get Bitcoin is to

mine it how does that work stay tuned you guys stay tuned whenever a transaction is

made using Bitcoin okay it spurs a process that involves a big complicated math

problem that encodes the information from that transaction into something

called a block whoever can do the computation the fastest wins the Bitcoin

bounty the block is then added to a chain of other blocks making a block chain

the block chain is stored on a network of computers and it's basically what

runs Bitcoin you can give it as like a ledger so on and on the process goes

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