Taking a Closer Look at Bitcoin

The following is lesson #2 in my free Introductory to Cryptocurrency Course, if you would like the full course you can grab it by clicking here. In today's lesson we are going to diving into bitcoin a little bit further and look at the history of bitcoin as well.

Here is a list of all of the lessons so far:

• Lesson : 1 - What are Cryptocurrencies

Grab The Video Version of this lesson below:

Alright, everybody, so in this lesson, we're going to talk more about Bitcoin.

Again, Bitcoin is the main thing to understand here. It's the most popular type of coin that's traded online. It's also worth the most. We also use Bitcoin to trade other coins, when we work more with the buying and selling process.

I'll explain that a little bit better for you guys and you'll kind of know how that works, but for now, I'm just on Google here. I did a quick search for Bitcoin because this is a really good definition of it here. Again, this can be a little bit confusing, but here is what a Bitcoin is - A Bitcoin is a type of digital currency with encryption techniques that are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify a transfer of funds operating independently of a central bank.

Basically what that means is that Bitcoin is a type of online technology that can be used to trade, transfer money, and it's safer, more secure, and you don't need a bank to do it. That's kind of why it's so popular.

Again, I'm going to leave some reference material that gos more in depth about Bitcoins, how Bitcoins are made, in the external files for this lesson if you want to check them out, but you don't have to know that kind of stuff. That's just kind of there if you want it. I don't even know a heck of a lot about Bitcoin. I've only been trading these coins for about six months now. I'm still pretty new to the whole process, but again, you don't need to be an expert to get started.

Anybody can start it, it's just like any kind of investment. You just got to know how to basically do it.

If we go back to Coin Market Cap, we're going to look at Bitcoin here. I'm just going to show you guys the history of Bitcoin and why online coins and Bitcoins are so promising.

If we go back to May of 2013, you'll see that this is where this graph starts. It goes all the way until, which I'm guessing is today, which is July 18th at the time of filming this lesson. We can see here how much the price of Bitcoin has gone up. Anybody who invested in Bitcoin in 2013, obviously if they still had any Bitcoin, is a millionaire because it's worth so much now.

Back when we started, you can see the price was about $100 per Bitcoin. If you bought 10 Bitcoins for $100 back in 2013 and you sold them for $1,000 each, you'd make $10,000 off a $1,000 investment. Obviously, there's no way of knowing that would happen. Nobody could have guessed this really would have happened because we didn't have any kind of reference or any kind of evidence that would say that Bitcoins would get so popular.

You can see ever since then it's gone up, It's gone down. It goes up, It goes down. Then you can see just recently in the past starting about 2015 or so, it's really started to go up. You can see like it's just booming right now. It's at the top that it's been in 2017, which was May. It was priced at $2,000. Again, you can see it's super popular right now, It's still going up.

A lot of mainstream companies are adapting the technology. Even some countries are starting to actually accept payments in Bitcoin, which is pretty cool.

The cool thing about Bitcoin is it's still relatively unknown. I think they did a survey and about 90% of the population still doesn't know what a Bitcoin is. That just proves that something that has such a high value and isn't even close to becoming mainstream or becoming known has potential and it's getting more known as time goes on.

We can see here right now that, it's July right now, you can see that it's gone down a little bit.

I'm going to see if I can bring this graph to be, let's go 2016. We can see here that it's gone up, It went down a lot and it's kind of going back up a bit. You might question like if it's kind of reached its cap here and it's going down, why do we want to invest in Bitcoin and why should we invest?

In fact, a lot of people are selling right now because they're scared that it's going to go down. I'm here to tell you that when things go down, it's the perfect opportunity to buy because they will go up.

We're going to kind of explain that strategy as time goes on throughout this course of how you can make money buying Bitcoins when they're low in value and sell them when they go high.

We can see here that it just goes up and down. That's what the data says, so if something goes down, it's going to go up eventually. We'll talk more about that later, but for now, I just kind of want to take you guys through the process of Bitcoin and kind of just get you it in your head how much you can actually earn if you buy it. If you've bought it, even just a couple months ago when it was priced at $1,000 and you sold some now or you just held onto it, you'd get such a big return of investment because now it's like $2,700 right here.

That's only a short period of time. That's just a few months ago. It goes up and down quite a bit. That's what we're going to talk about in this course and how you can make money from that.

Anyways, I just wanted to introduce you guys to Bitcoin. I wanted to kind of show you the trends and why this is such an exciting thing to get into.

Just for reference, we're going to go back here and we're going to take a look at the number two coin, which is Ethereum. I think I'm saying that right. I don't even know how to say it correctly. I've heard a few people say it different. But you can see here, this one's a little bit more confusing.

We can see here that this one has gone up and down a lot. Just in March 2017, this was worth $30 American. You can see here that now, even today, it's worth $260. Anybody who invested even when it was going up a little bit, if they would have sold it even up around here, sold some of it, they would have made tons of money. You can see, it's gone down now, but it's a perfect opportunity that whenever something goes down to buy.

Again, we're going to talk about that later on.

I just want to introduce you guys to Bitcoin, kind of show you how this whole process is going to work. In the next section of the course, we're going to talk more about investing and things like that.

We're going to actually talk about short term investing and long term investing first and talk about the benefits of both and which one I ultimately recommend.

Alright, so I know this is a lot to take in, guys, but just take it in slow.

Read the reference material I've left for you guys. When you're ready, we'll move on further with the course.

Reference:

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-explained-five-year-old/