What began as a pet project for computer programmers and digital-privacy activists is today a financial technology worth billions of dollars. Author Nathaniel Popper takes us behind the scenes of that dramatic transformation and looks ahead at how this digital currency could shape the global economy of the future.
This program was originally broadcast on June 9, 2015.
GUEST:
- Nathaniel Popper -- Nathaniel Popper is a business reporter at the New York Times and the author of Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money.
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What is bitcoin?
From the Washington Post's Wonkblog: Bitcoin isn't the future of money -- it's either a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme
Each Bitcoin is really a share in a system that seems to make it cheaper to transfer things online—money, stocks, bonds, even the deed to your house—by cutting out the middleman. Well, kind of. Bitcoin doesn't remove the middleman so much as replace him with middlemen who don't make you pay much, but make society as a whole do so instead. Is this progress?