Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, let’s take a quick look at all the things you can actually buy with Bitcoin.

First, understand that accepting Bitcoin is complicated for merchants as its value fluctuates so much and as a result the list of things you can buy with Bitcoin is actually very short - but let’s dive in!

Overstock, an online furniture retailer, has been accepting Bitcoin for a while. It makes sense – allowing it for payments attracts wealthy early adopters, who are a great audience for more expensive items like furniture.

Another example are VPN services. They allow users to anonymously browse the internet. It seems obvious then that ExpressVPN, one of the largest providers, lets users pay anonymously with Bitcoin.

You can even buy a Domino’s pizza that way, but you have to go through a third party called Lightning Pizza. You send crypto to them, and they will then place an order on your behalf. Not exactly convenient, but it supposedly works!

Other famous examples include the claim that Tesla also accepts Bitcoin. That’s not true though - although publicly announced, it never happened, and Tesla backtracked and sold all of their Bitcoin holdings if Elon Musk’s tweets are to be believed.

But hope is on the horizon for this list to get larger. Paypal already allows you to buy and hold crypto through their app, and they promised that you will soon be able to use your Bitcoin balance anywhere Paypal is accepted.

But the real question is: Should you use Bitcoin to pay for things? Definitely a “no” if you care about the planet: Every Bitcoin transaction consumes the equivalent of two entire months of energy of a US household.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Is Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Have you come across the claim that crypto is just a Ponzi scheme meant to make the creators rich? What is behind that and is it true?

A Ponzi scheme is a type of investment fraud where someone promises you certain returns, but instead of generating them through a legitimate strategy like stock trading, pays you with the money of future investors until the scheme collapses.

Let’s take Bitcoin as an example and see if it is such a scheme.

First, owning Bitcoin – like any other speculative asset – does not guarantee returns. There is no single authority controlling it and making promises. It's volatility is high and many people have lost money.

US authorities classify it as a commodity, similar to Gold. Bitcoin’s value can only rise further if more people buy into it and hold, like a savings account. Unlike other commodities such as oil, which powers engines, it functions mostly as a store of value because it has not reached mass adoption as a payments system. The investment assumption is that people hold on to it for savings.

Other blockchains, such as Ethereum, are a little more complex. They hope to provide massive utility in the future - replace today’s payment systems, or even the entire financial system. They are more like stock, where you speculate on the potential utility of your investment.

You probably see that legitimate crypto projects like Bitcoin don’t look like a ponzi scheme, they are simply not built to steal your money. Everything is transparent on the blockchain and determined by supply and demand.

But just because hype around an investment is not fraud, you need to keep in mind that crypto is one of the riskiest investments you can make. It’s an unregulated market, big market participants can easily affect the price, and fraud is a real problem, especially with lesser known coins. So do your homework, every time.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

A brief history of cryptocurrencies

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, let’s take a brief look at the history of crypto, why it was invented, and how it evolved.

It all started in 1983, when a researcher called David Chaum imagined digital money, and his idea slowly started to resonate with the cypherpunks movement. This group was interested in ways to preserve anonymity through cryptography in the early days of the internet, and an anonymous digital payments system was eventually outlined by one member, Wei Dai, in 1998.

But the internet was young, and that idea remained dormant until 2009, when an anonymous programmer under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin.

In the first transaction ever, Satoshi referenced an article about a bank being bailed out by the British government after the 2008 financial crisis, leading people to believe that Bitcoin was a protest against government controlled financial systems.

Bitcoin became popular quickly and in May 2010 someone made the first real world transaction – he paid another person 10,000 Bitcoins in exchange for two pizzas. It may sound silly in retrospect, but this was significant: Bitcoin suddenly had a value.

The year after, the first major alternative blockchain was launched: Litecoin was a Bitcoin clone, aimed at improving upon it. Many more so-called altcoins followed it.

At this point, crypto was only used to store value or send money around. But a young computer programmer called Vitalik Buterin wanted to replace the entire financial system: Smart contracts would turn crypto into programmable money with infinite potential.

His vision was called Ethereum and caught the attention of Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, who gave him $100,000 dollars to drop out of college and pursue the idea. Ethereum was launched in 2015 and took the world by storm. By mid 2017 it already overtook Bitcoin in transactions per day.

Later that year, Bitcoin itself touched $20000 - making that original pizza purchase worth $200 million dollars.

The markets pulled back, and Bitcoin dropped to around $4000 before starting a meteoric rise again in 2020. Today, there are almost 10000 traded tokens, and Bitcoin is still the largest cryptocurrency.

We hope you liked this brief trip down memory lane. And next time we discuss the claim that crypto is really just a ponzi scheme.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

What are the differences between Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Ethereum 2.0?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, let’s dig into the history of Ethereum and understand why there are several different versions of it.

At first, there was only one Ethereum - the original blockchain that is able to execute smart contracts. But it suffered a very costly hack in 2016: About $50m dollars worth of Ethereum were stolen by a single hacker.

The Ethereum community was looking at two paths forward at the time: Just move on and accept the hack, or roll back the blockchain to revert it. Think of it as going back in time in your bank account history, as if nothing new happened.

Ultimately, both options happened simultaneously in a so-called “fork”. The original Ethereum lived on after rolling back and restoring the balances to before the hack, and a copy was split off that did not roll back. That copy is known as Ethereum Classic, and the modified original is today’s well-known Ethereum. They have operated completely separately since the split despite their shared origin.

That brings us to Ethereum 2. It is an upcoming, major update to Ethereum, which will bring much faster and more affordable transactions to the blockchain. And again, the blockchain will split in two - Ethereum and Ethereum 2. The creators assume though that most, if not all, participants will simply transition over to Ethereum 2, this time without fighting over the future.

And next time we take a brief look at the entire history of crypto.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

What is Litecoin and what makes it special?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, let’s talk about Litecoin, one of the earliest altcoins.

Litecoin was developed in 2011 by a Google Engineer. At the time, Bitcoin was the only established blockchain and just started getting recognition among insiders. But already, some people saw its disadvantages in scaling to real-world usage and started thinking about alternatives.

Litecoin is one of those first altcoins. The developer, Charlie Lee, took Bitcoin’s open source code and modified it to make Litecoin more usable for every-day transactions.

While it still uses the same fundamental working principles, Litecoin has a few advantages over Bitcoin: It is much faster and the fees are so low, that it can be used for small transactions. It also made Litecoin less vulnerable to hacking attacks.

And indeed, when Litecoin launched, it quickly became very popular but never actually ended up taking over Bitcoin despite its improvements upon it. But it still sits in the top 25 cryptocurrencies and has remarkably wide adoption: It is one of the very few coins actually used in the real world: Thousands or merchants accept it and even Paypal lets users pay with it – making it the only other coin besides Bitcoin and Ethereum to have that honor.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Are Bitcoin’s best days over?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, let's talk about the future of Bitcoin – is it outdated and will soon make room for a modern successor, or will it forever stay the number 1 cryptocurrency by market capitalization?

Surely you know by now that everything started with Bitcoin. It has revolutionized the way we think about digital money and the entire financial system. But it is also the oldest technology and the vision of crypto has expanded a lot since then. So what does that mean for its future?

First, we need to understand that there are two different ways to think about Bitcoin – to some people, it is simply a great store of value, like digital gold. And with a limited supply by design, people like it as an alternative to savings in traditional currency, because that can be printed and de-valued by governments as they please.

On the other hand you have those who want to use crypto as digital money. They pump money into crypto to bet that it will someday be the only way we send currency around, pay for things, and invest. And arguably Bitcoin just can’t handle real-world use. The amount of transactions it can process at a time – which is currently just 7 per second – and how quickly it takes for them to be confirmed - which is around 10 minutes – is a real problem. Imagine buying ice cream like that - it would be impossible.

That’s why newer technologies have popped up, like Ethereum which still has similar problems but is fully programmable, and more recently Solana, Avalanche, Celo, etc. And they start to eat away at Bitcoin. But who knows - real Gold still has the highest market cap of all assets, with almost 12 trillion dollars it is worth 4x more than Apple, the most expensive company in the world. Never underestimate the potential of digital gold.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

What is Bitcoin Cash and what makes it special?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, let's talk about one of the first altcoins, Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin Cash is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies and goes all the way back to 2017. At the time, it became clear that Bitcoin itself could not handle high transaction volumes and the crypto community started fighting over its future.

There were two factions: Those that saw Bitcoin purely as a store of value – such as Gold – were happy. But those that saw it as a means to send payments around, noticed that Bitcoin was hitting its limits. But to make Bitcoin handle more transactions required deep technical changes and so the decision was made to go separate paths and create Bitcoin Cash as an alternative and keep the original Bitcoin running as a separate blockchain.

Bitcoin Cash improves upon Bitcoin by allowing miners to validate many more transactions in one computation. Remember that mining is the process of validating recent payments, and in order to qualify for doing that, each computer has to solve a very complicated puzzle first, which takes time before the work can even start. With Bitcoin cash, more transactions can be validated together after each puzzle, and the complexity of the puzzle can be lowered if there is high demand.

The effort was only a partial success though: Bitcoin Cash just wasn’t adopted widely as an alternative. Today, years after the separation, Bitcoin’s market capitalization is over 100 times larger than BitCoin Cash’s… and the gap is growing.

And next time we stay on the topic and discuss if Bitcoin’s best times are over - see you then!

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

What is Worldcoin?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, let’s talk about a crypto project that has gotten a lot of attention lately: Worldcoin.

The idea behind Worldcoin is to get a majority of the world population to use cryptocurrencies. According to the project’s estimates, only 3% have used a cryptocurrency so far, and it aims to change that by distributing its Worldcoin to billions of people, giving everyone an initial amount.

No small task, especially considering that not everyone has access to smartphones and the internet. And how the company plans to do this is where things get really interesting.

Faced with the challenge of letting people own and use Worldcoin without specific technology, they invented a device called “the Orb”. Operators, people who travel around with those Orbs, use it to scan a person’s eye to convert the data into a unique code. From that point forward, your eye becomes your key to your Worldcoin.

This also attempts to solve the challenge of fraudulent claims: The problem with giving away a set amount of free Worldcoin to each person is that someone will always try to game the system and get more. And since a human’s eye is unique, the Orb device will prevent that in theory.

But so far, this is all just an ambitious idea with a lot of funding. A few Orbs are allegedly already being tested in the field, but the project admits that it needs to build at least 50000 per year to scan enough people. And you should know that the creators and investors plan on keeping 10% of all Worldcoin to reward themselves.

And that is Worldcoin! And next time we’ll continue our series on fascinating new crypto currencies.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

What are crypto games?

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, let’s talk about crypto gaming: what it is and why it has become so popular recently.

In short, crypto gaming tends to be a combination of online gaming and speculating on crypto currencies.

Let’s unpack those two things one at a time.

Online gaming can take many forms, such as apps like FarmVille where you have to make sure your farm is running well, to world of warcraft, which is a virtual reality game where you build your character over a long time and explore a massive world with thousands of other people.

Traditionally these games have their own economies, so you pay the actual company directly for in-game things like extra water for your crop or new items for your avatar.

And that’s where crypto comes in. Crypto games also have these economies, but they are crypto currency based. Instead of paying a company to play, you buy into the game’s token, and might even make money participating. Some games even have such vivid economies that people turn gaming into a full time job. An example of that is Axie Infinity, a game where you can battle against other players’ creatures. It has 2 million active users, and each player has spent roughly $400 to get started.

But it’s always a speculation on the game’s cryptocurrency retaining its value - because if it doesn’t, many players may turn around and play something different.

And that is crypto gaming. And next episode we will continue our deep dive on interesting crypto currencies.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

How you can make money by learning about crypto

Welcome to the cryptohunt jam where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain english.

Today, we’ll talk about the world of Learn and Earn, where you can make crypto money just by learning about new projects.

Remember from last episode, that many crypto projects – for example new blockchains or tokens – have a cold start problem. It means that they have a hard time finding people at first, who want to buy in.

That works out to your advantage though, because there are small learning courses that try to solve this problem. Since many legitimate new projects have an interesting way to solve existing problems, they bet that if you know about it, you are interested in investing. So they are actually willing to give you some of their crypto currency in exchange for your time.

How do you find those classes. The two largest exchanges for example, Binance and Coinbase, let you take those courses for a handful of projects. It’s as simple as signing up and navigating to the tab, and if you pay attention and get the answers right, you get a few dollars in the respective currency.

We hope you like those courses and learn a thing or two that’ll make you crypto smarter. We certainly do, and that’s why we’ll have a lot of those classes on cryptohunt.it shortly after we launch. Head on over to join the waitlist.

And next time, we’ll talk about crypto games: What they are and how people even make money with them.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.