Криптовалюта. Лучшее объяснение для чайников

[00:02] Let me manage the state's money and I don't care who will make the laws in it. In 2009, a student from Norway, Christopher Koch, came across a document on the Internet that talked about a new

[00:16] digital currency, Bitcoin, out of interest. Christopher bought 5,000 coins for $25 and forgot about them after 4 years. Christopher saw in the news that Bitcoin had risen in price by 1000% and realized that his

[00:32] $25 had turned into $ 800,000. At the same time, 1,000 km from Christopher, another man named James Howells remembered that his old hard drive contained 7,500 bitcoins that he had mined a couple of years

[00:48] ago. Searching this drive, he realized that during the cleaning he had simply thrown it into the city dump. Today, this drive still lies somewhere underground, and bits on

[01:00] NM are worth several hundred million dollars. There are tens of thousands of such stories. In some of them, yesterday's students suddenly become dollar millionaires. And others, in pursuit of easy money, A week they lose all

[01:15] their savings, and finally, the third is simply forgetting their passwords and cannot spend forgetting their passwords and cannot spend their wealth. But what are cryptocurrencies anyway? Is this some kind of huge financial bubble or a future in which

[01:28] financial bubble or a future in which we will live almost

[01:41] buying up cryptocurrencies, others do not recognize them, but at the same time they are trying to create their own digital money? Now I will help you understand all this. Get ready for a journey that will forever change your understanding of the world of finance. This is what

[02:04] New York looked like in September 2008. suits with boxes in their hands are leaving a building in the center of Manhattan one after another. These people were fired from the largest bank in the world, L Brothers, and while no one knows that these layoffs will begin the deepest

[02:20] economic crisis on the planet since the Great Depression, a decline in production, rising unemployment, the disappearance of easy loans, could hit us too. Almost no one thought that more than 2 million people in the United

[02:35] States alone would lose their jobs. The crisis will spread to other countries that are closely linked to the American economy, and pension funds around the world will lose trillions. dollars How can this happen? Yes, because for

[02:49] several years before the crisis, banks were giving out mortgages to everyone, packaging them into separate securities and making billions on these speculations. I barm. Now I have a yacht, a yacht,

[03:02] and you know that in the end, these same banks will be saved. At the expense of the state. They are too important for the economy to go bankrupt. Billions are in teachers' pensions. They are everywhere. If someone's collapse is unacceptable, it is theirs. But where did the

[03:16] money come from for their salvation? In the midst of the crisis, part was taken from taxes and part was simply printed. Thus, people's savings were devalued. Just look at how people's savings were devalued. Just look at how global inflation rose in 2008. It

[03:31] turned out that banks first earned superprofits and then were saved at the expense of taxpayers. And is it possible to do something about this injustice? If the state prints money monopolistically, stores it, and

[03:44] the state prints money monopolistically, stores it, and uses it, the bank will come up with a currency that will not depend on either banks or the government. It sounds like something impossible, but in the same 2008, an anonymous person under the name Satoshi posted on komoto An

[03:57] internet document called Bitcoin is a digital called Bitcoin is a digital peer-to-peer system, very important. Look, let

[04:09] 's say one person transfers 10 coins to another, and after a while, he returns five coins. Total. We have two operations so that no one can change this list and then say, for example, that he did not receive any money.

[04:24] This list is not stored in just one place, but simultaneously by all participants. Moreover, when, after a while, they want to make another transaction, the old records will be encrypted in a block, this block will receive a long code

[04:40] called a hash, and new transactions will be recorded in a new block, which will contain the hash of the previous block. When the transactions in this block are completed, it will also be encrypted, and so the list of transactions will end up in the

[04:56] transactions will end up in the blockchain. Well, what's revolutionary here, you ask? The fact is that if you try to forge a record in one of the blocks, the entire chain will be disrupted. After all, the hash of each block not only reflects a set of transactions,

[05:10] but is also linked to the hash of other blocks. This forgery will be immediately noticed by other participants in the system. After all, they store all the records of the blockchain, and there can be thousands of such participants, as well as transactions in a block, so it is impossible to distort It becomes almost impossible for

[05:25] all participants in the system to have information about the blockchain. It turns ledger where all transactions are stored, but this ledger is not held

[05:37] but this ledger is not held by the bank, but by all participants in the blockchain. But wait. We were talking about cryptocurrency. What does this have to do with any blockchain? And given that to create a new block, you need to find its hash, which is

[05:51] unknown in advance. It is only known that it consists of it consists of four characters, and to find it, network participants must try a bunch of options. That is, solve a computational problem. This is the

[06:04] essence of Bitcoin mining. The participants in the system who are looking for a new block are called miners. When a miner finds the correct hash for a new block,

[06:16] he shares it with other participants, they check the correctness of the hash and all operations in the block. And if everything is correct, they add a new block to their version of the blockchain, and the miner receives a reward in the form of that very bitcoin digital

[06:31] currency, which is credited to his wallet. And here is a document explaining this system. Satoshi sent a document to komoto by email to everyone who was deeply studying cryptography at that time. And on January 3, 2009, he created the first A block in the

[06:47] Bitcoin blockchain. This block did not contain any transactions. It contained only one phrase: "The Chancellor of the Exchequer is on the verge of a second bailout of banks." This phrase

[06:59] was the headline of the British newspaper The Times that day and meant that the world was in a state of deep financial crisis. And on January 12, Satoshi made the first And on January 12, Satoshi made the first transaction in block 170. He sent 10

[07:13] bitcoins to programmer Hal Finney. Over time, more and more people visited the Bitcoin website, got acquainted with the new technology and became miners. It's hard to imagine this now. But at first, Bitcoin was worth less than a cent,

[07:27] that is, it was used not as money but as an unknown technology for testing the system. But gradually this technology became more and more well- technology became more and more well- known. It got to the point that in 2010, an

[07:40] American programmer wrote a historic message on a Bitcoin forum. He promised to transfer 10,000 bitcoins to anyone who ordered two pizzas. In 4 days, a new message appeared on the forum: the

[07:55] programmer bought two pizzas from Papa John's for 10,000. At that rate, these pizzas cost about 40 dollars in bitcoins. Who knew that soon each of them would cost more than a hundred million dollars? But why did this complex and

[08:10] unknown technology suddenly begin to rapidly capture people's minds? What is Bitcoin backed by? That people decided to buy and sell it, and its rate keeps growing and growing. To answer this question, we need to figure out what

[08:24] question, we need to figure out what money is anyway. But first, about the sponsor of this video. I'm sure you've heard about cgpods headphones from the Tyumen company Cas Guru. The headphones are assembled in China, but according to the developments and strict control of Cas

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[10:11] history of exchange, because in order to buy something, you need to sell something, that is, exchange one thing for another, and the thing that was exchanged most often became money. In the early days of mankind, this role was played by cattle, animal skins, and even huge boulders,

[10:26] but over time, people They realized that commodity exchange was inconvenient and that they needed to find something more universal, so they began to use precious metals and coins made of them as money. But the faster the global economy developed, the less convenient the

[10:42] metals became: they were difficult to transport and difficult to control their mission. And most importantly, they simply became insufficient to finance states and wars between them. By the 18th century, Europe switched to paper money, which was actually based on

[10:58] gold and silver, and for the next 200 years, the global economy lived on paper years, the global economy lived on paper money: pounds, dollars, francs, all of which filled the vaults of the largest banks. But after World War II, 3/4 of the world's

[11:12] gold reserves accumulated in the United States, and the American dollar became the main world currency; in fact, it was the only one backed by gold. And all other currencies were tied to it in this Breton Woods system. The world lived until

[11:27] 1971, until the United States unilaterally canceled this

[11:52] time the states had printed so many dollars that there was not enough gold to back these pieces of paper. What did money become backed by after that? The abolition of the gold standard is based on nothing but the guarantees of central banks and the trust of the people.

[12:07] other fiat currency, can be used for exchange, and the more people use a certain currency, the more reliable and stable it is. However,

[12:19] this design has several features. Firstly, fiat money is controlled by the state, which regularly prints it, devaluing your savings. Secondly, settlements in the economy go through banks, but banks can lose

[12:34] depositors' money for a hundred reasons. In other words, the main medium of exchange in the modern economy is, as it were, not in your hands, but Bitcoin belongs only to you and you do not need a bank or other

[12:48] intermediary to transfer it. All you need to know is the recipient's wallet address and lose your money. You can only do this if you tell the scammers the key to your wallet. Finally, there is a rule by which Bitcoin will be mined.

[13:02] rule by which Bitcoin will be mined. Only 21 million coins are mined, and moreover, every 210,000 blocks, the reward for finding the hash of a new block is halved. This means that if in 2009 a miner received 50 bitcoins for adding a block,

[13:16] miner received 50 bitcoins for adding a block, today it is a little more. Despite this, there are more and more miners, and if earlier it was possible to mine Bitcoin on a home computer, today this is done by huge farms on

[13:30] thousands of square meters. This competition has practically no effect on the speed of Bitcoin mining, but thanks to this mechanism, Bitcoin, unlike fiat money, which is printed more and more every year, does not depreciate, which is why it is

[13:43] called digital gold. It turns out that if any money is just a means of exchange, then it is not surprising that Bitcoin is

[13:59] people simply believed that the new technology would finally give them complete control over their money, and the more people mined Bitcoin, the more they trusted it. However, Bitcoin's throughput is very small -

[14:13] only seven transactions per second, while Visa has 24,000 per second. Yes, such slowness of Bitcoin is necessary for its stable operation. But it also hinders its widespread use, and when blockchain technology became understandable and popular,

[14:29] thousands of programmers began to think about how to make Bitcoin

[14:43] Google employee created a cryptocurrency that works. It is eight times faster than Bitcoin, it is easier to mine, and transactions with it were simply cheaper. If Bitcoin was digital gold, then the new Lightcoin coin became a digital analogue of

[14:58] silver B. But Lightcoin was not the only alternative to Bitcoin. For example, in 2012, the RLE cryptocurrency appeared. Unlike the transfer system, Swift Ripple is capable of transferring clients' money not in a

[15:12] few days, but in a few seconds and practically for free. And after 2012, there were more and more different coins and projects. But a real revolution in the Crypto world was made by This man. Meet Vitalik Buterin. He thought, what if we

[15:29] take the new technology that Bitcoin offers and solve the key problem of the economy, the problem of trust. For this, in 2015, the Ethereum project was launched, which offered smart contracts. Here's how they work. Let's say

[15:45] you want to buy an apartment. To protect yourself, you go to the bank and open a letter of credit, an account into which you deposit money, which the seller will receive only when he signs the purchase and sale agreement so that no one is deceived. The

[15:58] bank controls the transaction and takes For this commission, the Ethereum smart contract removes the bank from the transaction; the system itself checks the terms of the contract and, when they occur, transfers money from one wallet to another quickly, cheaply, and

[16:13] reliably, just like car servicing at Fit Service, auto service, fit-service, auto service and auto parts, fit-service, auto service and auto parts, fit-service, auto services,

[16:29] but brilliant, so already at the stage of issuing its own coin, which is called Ether, Vitalik Buterin's team attracted more than $18 million, and the price of Ether has grown by 10,000 since its launch. And with the advent of smart

[16:45] decentralized finance arose; people began creating platforms where you could anonymously exchange one cryptocurrency for another, get a loan in cryptocurrency, or put it on deposit without banks and

[16:58] intermediaries, but simply on the blockchain. In general, what Bitcoin was invented for. Thanks to Ethereum, creating your own cryptocurrency became easier because you no longer had to invent your own

[17:13] blockchain; roughly speaking, Ethereum became a language. programming in the crypto world because it became much easier to create your own coin, everyone started doing it. Look how after the release of Ethereum in 2017, ICOs were issued, releasing their own

[17:30] coins. Now, any startup could raise capital without much government oversight, and the crypto industry began to resemble the internet of the late 1990s, when everyone understood that the internet was the future and internet companies were springing up like

[17:45] future and internet companies were springing up like mushrooms after rain. The idea of ​​ICOs looks like this: we come up with a project, issue our own coin for it, promise investors that this coin will skyrocket by 1000%, and collect money from them by selling our coins. Where is

[17:59] the Trap? Remember the TV series "Squid Game"? There, people competed in lethal contests for a large sum of money. On the wave of the series' popularity, information appeared on the internet about a crypto project, the developers of which promised to hold a

[18:13] tournament based on the game, and to participate, you had to make a contribution by purchasing the SKD coin, which they themselves issued. The price of the coin gradually increased until at one point it turned out that the coin can be bought, but cannot be sold. That's all there is to it. The

[18:28] the coin can be bought, but cannot be sold. That's all there is to it. The became worth less than a cent. Of course, not all ICOs are a scam. Ethereum, for example, raised over $18 million in 2014 and brought its early investors

[18:44] fabulous profits. However, most ICOs turned out to be dummies, the purpose of which was to play on human greed. But if you think it's crazy to invest in a coin to participate in a game of squid, then what do you say about buying

[19:00] you say about buying pictures online for tens of thousands of

[19:12] Christie's auction house sold a painting by American artist Mike Winckelmann, under the artist Mike Winckelmann, under the pseudonym Beeple, for $69 million. The painting was called "Every Day for the First 5,000 Days." In fact, these were 5,000

[19:27] pictures that the artist painted daily for almost 14 years. So what? Christie's has sold more expensive art pieces, for example, Leonardo da Vinci's "Savior of the World" for $450 million in

[19:41] Leonardo da Vinci's "Savior of the World" for $450 million in November 2017, or a triptych from 1976. November 2017, or a triptych from 1976. Francis Bacon for 86 million in May 2008, but the painting by Bill did not exist in physical form, there was only its digital

[19:55] version. But what was sold then? An NFT was sold, a unique token in the blockchain that confirms who owns a particular asset. But let's say there are

[20:07] millions of ethers and bitcoins and each of them has the same value, then an NFT can be compared to a work of art, for example, the famous Mona Lisa by Da Vinci is one of a kind and is stored in the Louvre. Yes, you can make perfect

[20:21] copies of this painting, but you will only pay for the right to look at the Mona Lisa at the Louvre box office, and NFT confirms that you own the original item. Anyone can look at the blockchain and make sure that this is true. It still sounds strange.

[20:38] Maybe, but after the purchase of Bill's work, a real NFT boom began, and these were purchases not of some incredible paintings, but of memes. And the more news appeared about some pictures on the Internet costing tens of thousands of dollars,

[20:53] the more people appeared who were ready to buy them in order to then sell them for even more. The most famous project became A collection of 10,000 unique NFTs collection of 10,000 unique NFTs depicting bored monkeys. The story is

[21:07] purely about business. The project's creators attracted celebrities to promote these NFTs. Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Post Malone, and other celebrities bought these monkeys for themselves and shared their purchases on social networks. A huge bubble of

[21:22] gifs, mobile game characters, and random pictures inflated. All of this was bought and sold for tens of thousands of dollars. The excitement was reminiscent of the 10th-century tulip mania, only instead of flowers, there were digital images that anyone could copy.

[21:37] This bubble deflated as quickly as it had grown. Trading volume fell by 97%. And many NFTs simply depreciated. It turned out that many who advised buying NFTs were promoting their products in order to sell them at the highest possible price on the wave of hype.

[21:51] Even those people who bought Bill's painting for $69 million did this in order to attract attention to their coin, which, after March 2011, depreciated to almost zero. But all these ICOs

[22:08] and NFTs are just flowers compared to how people make money on crypto. The real how people make money on crypto. The real mastodons of this

[22:24] before. They created platforms where users could trade cryptocurrencies. Today, there are more and more platforms like these. The emergence of crypto exchanges has greatly simplified working with cryptocurrencies. Of course, now you don't have to

[22:38] constantly send money back and forth to your personal wallet. But cryptocurrency is about independence and anonymity. A crypto exchange is

[23:15] the head of the exchange, Sam Nman Fried, uses clients' money for personal purposes. When people began withdrawing money en masse from the exchange, it froze their funds in response, and as a result, both the exchange's clients and the owners of its tokens lost money. The discount

[23:29] the exchange's clients and the owners of its tokens lost money. The discount is about $10 billion. This is not the only example of a reputable crypto exchange collapsing. Why does this happen? Because these exchanges not only take a percentage of transactions but also use their

[23:41] clients' money. And because the crypto world is a new industry, there is no strict regulation. And when an exchange accumulates huge sums, there is a temptation. use them for personal purposes, but wait, you said at the beginning that blockchain

[23:55] is an incredible breakthrough technology. : a technology that will change the world And now it turns out that the entire crypto industry is a complete scam No Just now that you know the basics, let's move on to the most interesting 2001 the country of

[24:11] El Salvador abandons its currency in favor of the United States dollar why does it do this formally To attract more investment and stabilize its economy Well, anyway, most people in the country use

[24:24] dollars and not local columns, so the country lives for the next 20 years until the President of El Salvador publishes messages on social networks about messages on social networks about

[24:41] technology by creating favorable conditions for the development of the crypto industry, but there is another dollar controlled by the United States government But who United States government But who controls Bitcoin, it seems that no one, and

[24:55] according to the government of El Salvador This step will reduce economic dependence on the United States and give the country more control over its monetary policy But it is for this same reason that most states do not recognize cryptocurrency

[25:09] as official money The basis for the existence of a state is control over society, which is achieved largely through power over Without it, the state will not be able to simply collect taxes. And even if we imagine that a

[25:22] separate cryptocurrency is not officially controlled by anyone. And the issue. According to the pro- Nadeli, everything is far from simple. Nadeli, everything is far from simple. For example, 67% of all bitcoins are stored in

[25:35] half a percent of all wallets. And what will happen if these market whales want to sell their coins? Yes, the entire system will collapse. Yes, a significant part of these coins is held by crypto exchanges that store the money of private investors. But why should people

[25:51] trust crypto exchanges but not trust states? Moreover, the variety of cryptocurrencies and their scalability do not allow them to be used as a single means of payment for hundreds of millions of people at a time, and due to the

[26:06] volatility of their exchange rate, it is simply impossible to plan long-term projects in cryptocurrency. Therefore, today most states do not recognize cryptocurrency as official money. But they consider them an investment asset. It

[26:19] has a place to exist and cryptocurrency can be used as a means of payment. While it is not backed by anything, it turns out that two separate worlds exist. One is the state with its own money, which it can completely control, and the

[26:33] other is private money that operates on the basis of technology and agreements between participants in the government system. They are essentially sitting on two chairs. They do not ban cryptocurrencies because they see the future in blockchain technology,

[26:47] but they also do not recognize them as money because this threatens the very existence of the state. Instead, countries are inventing their own national cryptocurrencies based on blockchain, the so- called digital currencies of central

[27:02] banks. With this currency, it will be more difficult to steal or launder money because its path can be traced step by step. And thanks to smart contracts, such money can only be transferred to a specified counterparty. On the

[27:15] one hand, there will be more convenience for citizens, but on the other, more control. As a result, decentralization, for which crypto is so loved, is becoming an instrument of government regulation. Does this mean that cryptocurrency is both a niche

[27:29] means of payment and a risky investment? Write your opinion in the comments. But one thing is certain: we are witnessing a shift in financial history that is happening before our eyes, and we ourselves will not have time to notice how digital

[27:42] ourselves will not have time to notice how digital money will become a part of our lives, just as the money will become a part of our lives, just as the watching this video. I hope it was useful to you. Write comments, like it,

[27:55] and share it with your friends. I want to say a special thank you to everyone who supports me on this video. By the way, you can buy my book on economics there. can buy my book on economics there. We'll meet in the next video.