The First Wave

The First Wave

A few months ago I read an article on some News website about Bitcoins.

Of course I was intrigued by the possibilities offered by this new form of currency and in particular the ability to actually "mine" cryptocurrencies.

But a quick research about BitCoin soon revealed that one needed more than a home computer to achieve anything.
The market had already been captured by a few very large systems using application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) Even the small USB types that you can buy on eBay for about $50 could not deliver more than about $0.11 a day.
Larger ASIC units sell for more than $10,000 if you can get one at all (mostly in the US) and take months for delivery after you have paid for them. (and by then the mining difficulty has increased and you need a bigger more expensive one)

So I put the idea in the proverbial too-hard-basket and moved on.

Some time later another news article came to my attention. This time it was about some guy who purchased a Ferrari using BitCoins as payment. Interesting. This currency could actually be used for making purchases.
There was that early 2008 purchase of a Pizza for 10,000 BTC which at today's prices would value the pizza at $9.5 millions USD.

Also at about that time the Chinese government allowed the trade of Bitcoins (BTC) and the prices started to raise wildly going from about $130 in October 2013 to more than $1100 just a month later.
The prices later dropped after some false rumors about the chinese exchange having problems with cash transactions.

I wqas getting more interested and kept researching if there was any possible way to get on the bandwagon...