Bitcoin’s history

A history of Bitcoin – told through the five different groups who bought it

GeniusKp/Shutterstock.com

Dave Elder-Vass, Loughborough University
The recent fluctuations in Bitcoin’s value are just the latest in a series of spectacular peaks and troughs since it was created in 2009. (Though its price has been falling recently, it remains five times higher than last April, before the latest major peak began.)
Commentators are often dismissive of Bitcoin buyers, writing them off as naive victims of a fraudulent bubble. But if we look more carefully, we can trace the history of Bitcoin through five key narratives. Each has drawn in a different group of buyers and in doing so contributed to its long-term growth in value.

The idealists

Bitcoin arose from a tiny group of cryptographers who were trying to solve the “double spend” problem facing digital money: “cash” held as a digital file could easily be copied and then used multiple times. The problem is easily solved by financial institutions, who use a secure central ledger to record how much everyone has in their accounts, but the cryptographers wanted a solution that was more akin to physical cash: private, untraceable, and independent of third parties like the banks.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s solution was the Bitcoin blockchain, a cryptographically secured public ledger that records transactions anonymously and is kept as multiple copies on many different users’ computers. The first narrative of Bitcoin’s value was built into Nakamoto’s original “white paper”. This claimed that Bitcoin would be superior to existing forms of electronic money such as credit cards, providing benefits like eliminating chargebacks to merchants and reducing transaction fees.

The libertarians

But from an early stage, Nakamoto also marketed Bitcoin to a libertarian audience. He did so by stressing the absence of any central authority and particularly Bitcoin’s independence from both states and existing financial institutions.
Nakamoto criticised central banks for debasing money by issuing increasing amounts of it and designed Bitcoin to have a hard limit on the amount that could be issued. And he stressed the anonymity of Bitcoin transactions: safe, more or less, from the prying eyes of the state. Libertarians became enthusiastic advocates and buyers of Bitcoin, more as an act of rebellion than for financial reasons. They have remained highly influential in the Bitcoin community.

The savvy young

These, however, were small constituencies, and Bitcoin really started to take off in July 2010 when a short article on Slashdot.org (“news for nerds”) spread the word to many young and technically savvy buyers. This community was influenced by the “Californian ideology” – belief in the capacity of technology and entrepreneurs to transform the world.
Many bought small quantities at a low price and were somewhat bemused to find themselves sitting on significant investments when the price multiplied. They became used to huge fluctuations in the price and frequently advocated “hodling” Bitcoin (a mis-spelling of “hold”, first used in a now iconic message posted by an inebriated user determined to resist constant “sell” messages from day traders). The hodlers insisted, half seriously, that Bitcoin was going “to the moon!” (used 178,000 times on the bitcointalk forums), and talked of buying “lambos” (lamborghinis) with their gains. This countercultural levity generated a sense of community and a commitment to holding Bitcoin that helps to sustain its value.

The investors

The last two groups that have contributed to Bitcoin’s history are more conventional. What I consider the fourth group of investors consists of speculators who have been attracted by the volatility and peaks in Bitcoin prices.
On the one hand, we have the day traders, who hope to exploit the volatility of Bitcoin’s price by buying and selling quickly to take advantage of short-term price movements. Like speculators in any other asset, they have no real interest in the larger picture or of questions of inherent value, but only in the price today. Their only narratives are “buy” and “sell”, often employed in an attempt to influence the market.
On the other hand, we have those who are drawn in by news of price bubbles. Ironically, bubble narratives in the press, often designed to deter investors, can have the opposite effect. These investors join what Keynes called a “beauty contest” – they only care what other people might be prepared to pay for a Bitcoin in the short to medium term future.

The portfolio balancers

The final and newest group of Bitcoin buyers are the portfolio balancers: more sophisticated investors who buy Bitcoin to hedge against wider risks in the financial system. According to modern portfolio theory, investors can reduce the riskiness of their portfolios overall by buying some Bitcoin because its peaks and troughs don’t line up with those of other assets, providing some insurance against stock market crashes. This is an emerging group, but one that could significantly raise Bitcoin’s acceptability among mainstream investors.
Bitcoin’s value, then, has been built on an evolving series of narratives which have drawn in successive waves of buyers. While mainstream commentators are often dismissive of Bitcoin as lacking inherent value, all asset market values depend on narrative processes like these.
Bitcoin may well collapse again, but so may any other financial asset. Investing in Bitcoin is neither more nor less risky than investing in the latest technology company launched on the stock market without ever having made a profit.
Dave Elder-Vass, Reader in Sociology, Loughborough University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Child abuse begins with a touch

Child Abuse and You:

A child abuse begins with a touch, normally by a third person. Let us not delve too deep into who the third person could be. Any body other than the parent is a third person. There is no gender or age bias in those who indulge in such perverse act. Studies have shown that 90% of people are sexually harassing children.

A child will reveal any abuse by her action, behavior or words. Parent Protect has given a list of signs to watch out for which could be warning signs in children. A combination of worrying signs could be the time to investigate possible abuse. But, about 75 percent of children do not tell anyone due to fear or threat.

It is no secret that children listen to their parents more than others. So, the first step is teaching them from a very young age the nuances of touch and inappropriate caressing so that they get to know the difference between Good Touch and Bad Touch. 

Developing children in a safe environment, to understand what is good and what is bad is the most important in today's time. Only children of parents who are ignorant of this are victims of sexual abuse.

Your daughter may be subjected to sexual harassment. If you ignore it, it means that you are not a responsible mother or father. If your daughter says in her inimitable style that she doesn't like somebody, give her a patient hearing, investigate immediately and protect her from that person.

If your child is not her self any more, looking glum and silent, not playing or studying as before, be warned. This may be the early sign or warning for you to take a deeper insight into the matter or seek advice.

Do not wait for your child to grow up. Make them understand the nuances of good and bad touch at the earliest. may be from the age of 3.

Facebook has introduced a user trustworthiness score

 – here's why it should go further

Facebook wants to improve trust. Shutterstock

Sharon Coen, University of Salford
Facebook has reportedly started giving users a secret trustworthiness score in its attempt to tackle fake news. According to the Washington Post, the score is partly based on users’ ability to correctly flag and report inaccurate news items on the site. Facebook then takes this score into account when working out how a user’s content should be spread around the network (although it doesn’t tell users what their score is).
Why has Facebook started doing this? Following events such as the supposed role of misinformation on social media during the 2016 US election via and the Brexit campaign, Facebook has been increasingly under pressure to curb the spread of fake news. But the platform is now facing the possibility that the growing awareness of misleading and false information has increased the likelihood that users will report articles as “fake” just because they don’t agree with them.
We can use psychology to explain why this might be happening. And it suggests that the trustworthiness score is a good idea. But I would argue that Facebook should go further and give each user a more comprehensive personal reputation score that they can view to determine the quality and reach of their content.
In psychology, we call the tendency to seek confirmation, and minimise or discard information challenging our own beliefs “confirmation bias”. Research on people in the US and Germany has shown (in line with other studies) that people tend to spend more time reading news consistent with their existing attitudes than stories that highlight a different position. The same study also shows reading news that supports your views strengthens them, while reading stories that show a discrepancy with your attitudes weakens them.
In general, people don’t like to face situations in which their beliefs are challenged. This gives rise to the uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance, the sense of holding two conflicting positions at once. To prevent this, people go to great lengths to prove their original beliefs are right. When exposed to facts that contradict our views, our choice is to either reconsider our position or to challenge the new information. And attacking the credibility of the information or its source can often do the trick.

Only Facebook can currently see user scores. Shutterstock

For example, research by colleagues and me has shown how people who deny the existence of – or the necessity to act upon – climate change go to great lengths to deny the value of the arguments presented. These strategies include denying and disputing the scientific evidence but also arguing that the scientists who produce it, and those trying to address the issue, are dishonest and have ulterior motives.
So it’s not surprising that the extensive media coverage of the issue of fake news (which research suggests was actually exaggerated in relation to the 2016 US election) might have encouraged Facebook users to flag as fake articles that make uncomfortable reading. And this creates a problem.
The idea of a secret trustworthiness score being used mysteriously by Facebook might put people off flagging content. But a publicly available score might be seen as a way to punish people who flagged content “incorrectly” by publicly shaming them. An alternative would be to allow users to see their own personal reputation scores based on what they share as well as what they flag, but not make them available publicly.

Using scores to change our behaviour

While we do have biases in our thinking, most of us want to feel useful and valuable. Studies have now shown how people use social media as a kind of identity laboratory, constructing a particular image of themselves that they present to the world. Our own research shows how Facebook use is associated with our need to feel like we belong to a community and that we are worthy and capable individuals. In a way, introducing reputation scores that users can access would satisfy this need, while also making sure that people do not feel discouraged from flagging content for fear of being profiled and singled out by the platform.
We already know how important authenticity and trust are online. People rely on online reputation scores to decide where to go, what to buy and what to do online. So a personal reputation score based on the quality and reliability of the sources of information we share online (and not only on the content we flag as fake) could be a useful tool for helping us spot actual fake news. Giving feedback on the accuracy of shared or flagged content could help us realise what we can trust and what we should flag, regardless of our wider opinions.
The challenge, of course, would be to figure out how to calculate this reputation score. But given how much data Facebook collects on its users, and on the content shared, perhaps this wouldn’t be too difficult.
Sharon Coen, Senior Lecturer in Media Psychology, University of Salford
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.