Cryptocurrencies: history, risks and opportunities

The story of the creation of bitcoin has a legend. The issue of cryptocurrencies is, for the general public, still mysterious, as are the methods for its purchases and resale’s and conversions in current currency. Despite this speculative use, however, virtual currencies cannot be equated with pure financial instruments nor much less, although they can also be used to make payments, to legal tender currency. The EU Parliament focused on the risks and opportunities of virtual currencies with the Resolution of 26 May 2016. In any case, the virtual currency demonstrates the aggregative strength of the currency.

Virtual currencies: a brief history

Despite having been generated recently, the origin of cryptocurrencies is already shrouded in legendary narratives. It is said that its creator is a certain Satoshi Nakamoto, who invented the first and most famous cryptocurrency: bitcoin. It was the year 2008. On October 31 (just over a month after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers) Nakamoto announced its program: to create an electronic monetary system using the peer-to-peer (p2p) network, i.e. a network parity in which each terminal is client and server (processor and controller) at the same time, exploiting the technology of shared registers (DLT), i.e. the blockchain, to prevent the currency from being copied.

Later in 2009, to be precise on January 3, the first "block" was created from which the bitcoin blockchain will develop: the block is, as they say, 'mined'. The next block records the first bitcoin transaction between Nakamoto and Finney (a cryptographic activist). Later the father of cryptocurrencies (perhaps identifiable with a certain Craig Wright) mined (i.e. he 'created') a million bitcoins.

His work has been continued by the so-called ' miners', miners, who, through very complicated operations, which are managed by extremely performing terminals (and which need a considerable amount of energy), can' undermine ', in fact, new bitcoins. That is, they can decrypt the string (the algorithm) of a block, which contains a certain amount of cryptocurrencies that are assigned to the miner as a 'prize'. This quantity is halved every 4 years: from the initial 50 it has gone to the current 12.5. Decryption is necessary for updating transactions: miners, in this way, take care, in addition to issuing new bitcoins , to guarantee the authenticity and regularity of each operation (without the need for a central authority, such as , for example, a bank).

However, the issue of new 'money' is limited: it cannot exceed 21 million units (currently it should be around 17 million units). When the predetermined unit threshold is reached, the Financial Peak Software itself will provide the currencies necessary to remunerate the miners.

But how much are bitcoins worth?

It is the answer to this question that has made them more and more famous and has ensured that the States are also interested in them. If 1,309 bitcoins were bought with one dollar in 2010, in 2017 the ratio had more than reversed: 1 bitcoin was worth more than 10,000 dollars. At the beginning of 2018 almost 20,000. This dizzying growth was also aided by the virtual currency Tether, which is anchored with a fixed exchange rate to a current currency, traded on the FOREX market. It is a stable coin (the only one in its time, which has been joined by others) that allows you to avoid the greatest difficulty of the virtual market in question: the conversion of digital currency (not to be confused with the electronic money of Dir. 2009/110 / EC and Legislative Decree No. 385/1993, articles 114-bis and following) in current currency.

The Tether represented an element of growth of confidence as a stabilizer of the market, but the bubble was destined to burst, as was the case emotionally. And perhaps it also broke out due to a drop, in fact, in investor confidence: at the beginning of the same year, in fact, through a cyber attack, a historical theft of the equivalent of 530 million dollars was carried out against the Japanese platform Coin check. Also in Italy, in the same period, the Bit Grail platform suffered a theft of 195 million dollars.

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