What’s a Bitcoin?

CUNY Lecture Series – CUNY Podcasts

The cyber currency created in 2009 as “a plaything for hackers,” will be used by governments by 2023 and consumers by 2027 by some estimates, Nathaniel Popper, author of Digital Gold: Bitcoin and theInside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, tells a Baruch audience. The digital dough wasn’t worth anything until 2011, adds Popper, when it was adopted by users of the now defunct Silk Road website — to buy and sell heroin and marijuana without the transactions being trackable. Bitcoins, which exist as entries on a digital ledger, had an exchange rate value of more than $500 in September 2016. “Most of the general public still thinks of this as some sort of weird Tamogatchi pet or Pet Rock or something, but this is something that basically every Wall Street bank has a team working on right now,” Popper says.