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Hi, everyone. And welcome back to geek time. Hi, Brad.

Hi, Lulu.

So what is our topic for today?

We're gonna be talking about cryptocurrency. We kind of talked about NFTs before. And NFTs kind of share a basic background with cryptocurrency, but we haven't really gotten into cryptocurrency before. So I think this is where we can kind of get into it.

Yeah. This is where everything started basically. First of all, cryptocurrency在中文叫加密货币. I think many people think of cryptocurrency, they think of Bitcoin 比特币 or even Dogecoin 狗狗币. But what exactly is cryptocurrency?

Oh, cryptocurrency is just a currency that doesn't have a central government or authority controlling it. So when you have your dollar, your Renminbi, someone had to print that or control the amount of it. And rather than that,

It’s usually the central bank, isn't it?

Like the central bank. But rather than that, this is something that's online. And there's like a digital ledger that has a list of everyone who has bought or sold the currency. And so they know who has what and this can be like anonymous. And that's why a lot of people really wanted it. But nowadays a lot of the exchanges are kind of starting to collect your personal data for tax purposes and things like that.

I see. so let me slow this down a little bit. There's no central authority. 一般来说我们生活中接触的货币, 不管是人民币或者说美金日元, 它都是由central bank一般都是央行来发行的, but cryptocurrency essentially there is no authority, no central authority, no government involved, and no regulatory bodies, 没有这种监管的机构.

So It's just everything stored in a ledger. You said像一个账本, a digital ledger.

Right.

And some people can be anonymous. They can - you don't know who they are. They're just an account number, but others might have to register. They might have to have their personal data there.

Yeah, so oftentimes if you're looking at the blockchain, you may not be able to know who the person is. But if you go to like, for example, the government will know who this person is because they've signed up for an exchange and that exchange has tied their account number to their name

I see and you mentioned blockchain. This was one of the hottest buzzwords a few years back, blockchain, 区块链.

Till this day I still don't know exactly what blockchain is, but I know this is the technology behind cryptocurrency, right? Blockchain made cryptocurrency possible.

Yeah, it is basically just all the data. Blockchain is the ledger. You have to decrypt and encrypt all the data. So whenever someone buys or sells something using the cryptocurrency or whenever cryptocurrency is traded, it has to go through authorization and they have to run the blockchain. In order to do this, they're using hundreds of computers or thousands of computers and they go through a process that's referred to as mining. So sounds you're like mining for gold. And essentially, that's what you're doing by using your computer to help the blockchain process. You're going to get some sort of payment.

Let me stop you there. So mining here就是挖矿. It's like you are mining for gold or mining for diamonds. And this is a way to make money in this cryptocurrency world?

Yeah. because rather than have - like a government doing all the mining or regulation, everyone is pitching in to do the regulation or to do the mining to move the data or to move the currency from one person to another.

Oh, I see it's like a community thing almost. I've heard of people doing the mining, 其实我自己朋友圈里面也有人去参与这种cryptocurrency的挖矿.