James Mackintosh
speaker
379 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2017
last heard Nov 2024
James Mackintosh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
People are very excited about what they're calling the first crypto president.
Donald Trump gave a big speech over the summer to a cryptocurrency conference where he came out strongly in favor of cryptocurrencies.
He said that he would reduce regulation, so he wants to have regulations made that
by people who like Bitcoin rather than the current administration, which has been very anti-cryptocurrencies.
So Bitcoin's a cryptocurrency, which means it uses some very interesting and clever maths to secure an online currency, which you can in principle use to transfer between people without the involvement of a government.
So almost all of the dollar is in fact a virtual currency as well.
Really, the distinction here is between being government backed.
So the dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, which means in principle, the government can dig into your pockets as taxpayers to back the dollar.
Bitcoin isn't backed by any government or indeed by anything.
It relies for its value on the fact that other people want it.
How do people invest in it?
Nowadays, you can buy it pretty much anywhere you buy stocks.
So most of the retail brokers will sell Bitcoin as well.
Plus there are ETFs and there are various companies that have built big stocks of it.
So their share prices tend to move quite closely with it as well.
Yes.
The whole point of it when it was originally designed was to allow it to be used as a currency so that retailers on the internet could sell stuff in the same way as they sell stuff for a $20 bill.
Unfortunately, it's not very good at it.
So it's expensive and slow compared with using dollars.
Well, it's incredibly volatile.
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