03 Jan 2014 / Independent – New cultural phenomena are constantly vying for our attention. I find this exhausting, so I do my best to ignore most of them. But occasionally the sheer weight of opinion, conjecture and discussion forces me to set aside my prejudices and investigate something. It happened with Twitter in 2007 and I liked it. It happened with Mrs Brown’s Boys in 2013 and I didn’t. Right now, it’s happening with the virtual currency called Bitcoin and, after a week of messing about with it, I can confidently state that I’m not sure how I feel about it. But stick with me. Maybe you, too, will be infected with a vague, semi-detached quasi-curiosity.
The fact that this article is about Bitcoin, has the word Bitcoin somewhere in the headings and contains illustrations pertaining to Bitcoin, will have already lost many people – which is a shame, because they’re my kind of people. Bitcoin certainly lost me. With a mostly forgotten economics A-level course under my belt and a love of technology embedded in my heart, Bitcoin should have been right up my street. But whenever I started reading about it, I, like many others, started to daydream about foreign travel or exotic desserts instead.
The key to our collective ambivalence about Bitcoin lies in its almost hilarious inexplicability; head over to YouTube and you’ll find dozens of primers and tutorials, all of which seem to pose more questions than they answer. Rather as with contract bridge, the effort required to get your head around Bitcoin seems wildly disproportionate to any potential benefit that might conceivably head your way. But there’s always a lot of dead time at the end of the year with little to do other than eat soft-centred chocs, so I set myself the challenge of finding out why I should give a toss about Bitcoin. You see what I did there?
I’ve managed perfectly well without it, of course. I have some pounds sterling in a bank account represented by a positive number, and a relationship with a credit-card company that allows me to maintain a negative-pounds-sterling balance. This arrangement works without any problems. The two amounts have little to do with notes and coins in my pocket; it’s just numbers on a screen rising and falling as I spend or receive money – and that’s fine, I know that cash can be a nebulous concept….. Read more
