I used to work in IT, so I somewhat understand "Blockchain", but I still can't grasp how you make something like Bitcoin out of nothing?
I think people are [slowly] beginning to realize "The Emperor Has No Clothes" when it comes to crypto currencies.
You have to use an incredible amount of computer power to solve riddles and then beat the final boss and save the princess. Then you get to mine a bitcoin.
Make perfect sense on what a currency should be based on.
“I used to work in IT, so I somewhat understand “Blockchain”, but I still can’t grasp how you make something like Bitcoin out of nothing?”
first, wash trade it to infinity (illegal in legit investment markets), then pay tens of millions to celeb “influences” to promote FOMO and of course appeal to inherent human greed and ignorance and the desire for spinning gold from dross ... it’s pretty much how ALL Ponzi scheme bubbles work ... the main difference is the patina of high-tech jargon for this one ...
btw, blockchain is nothing more than an EXTREMELY slow and inefficient ledger distributed and maintained on the file systems of millions of so-called “miner” computers that consume enough electricity annually to power a country like Belgium ... blockchain is fundamentally a scam too as no killer application has been found for it in the 14 years that it’s been promoted .... well, unless you count funding terrorists and criminals ...
Cryptocurrencies are like serial numbers on paper money. Instead of handing someone a paper $20 bill, you transmit the serial number to them and they spend it.
Unlike fiat paper money, Bitcoin has a known upper limit of how many serial numbers can be used. The blockchain prevents someone from counterfeiting it using a duplicate number. Mining Bitcoin is running a computer program to find a number that's not yet issued. As another poster noted, of the 21,000 possible combinations, about a 1,000 are still available to identify. It takes a lot of computer processing to find such unique number combinations that aren't already in use.
Whereas with U.S. dollars, the Fed can print as much as they want, devaluing those already in circulation. The feds can identify billions as shredded that they instead put back in circulation. They can print bills with new numbers or print bills with duplicate serial numbers that they send on pallets to Iran, Afghanistan, or Ukraine.