When you think about the purchases and transactions you make on a daily basis there isn’t much thought that goes into the idea of it all. There isn’t any thought about where that money came from to purchase that thing and how the transaction is being tracked. Learning about cryptocurrency this first week of my project has been enlightening. I didn’t really think at all about digital currency and that being a thing. These past few months at school, I have heard about NFTs but have never really known what it was. Learning and reading about Bitcoin and NFTs has pushed me to believe that their original purpose or their purpose now is to bring more security, uniqueness, and ownership to one’s assets. 

My expectations coming into this project were that I was going to learn about business, the stock market, and what it means to navigate through all of that. For me, there is so much I didn’t know and so much that I still don’t know and am confused about. I hope that coming into this next week I will learn more about why such a thing, like Bitcoin, was created or needed. I know about its benefits and how decentralized it is and how it doesn’t run through the government. I know how much faster it is and cheaper it is to make a transaction using Bitcoin. I guess I am asking if the creator’s vision was more about keeping the user’s personal info hidden and having a currency separate from the government. It’s hard to discern the real idea behind creating Bitcoin as all we do know is that the person who created it uses the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto and that they have been credited as the person who mined the first blockchain of Bitcoin and published the whitepaper for the digital currency.

Learning about how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been banned in some countries and how others have officially made Bitcoin legal tender has been really interesting. Some leaders and people like Andre Cronje, former Fantom Foundation technical adviser, speak about the need to regulate and have more policies on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. A lot of people and countries see cryptocurrency as dangerous, specifically Bitcoin. They have claimed that Bitcoin can be used to funnel money to illegal sources and fear that it could almost destabilize their own financial systems. Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury, stated “I think many (cryptocurrencies) are used, at least in a transaction sense, mainly for illicit financing. And I think we really need to examine ways in which we can curtail their use, and make sure that anti-money laundering (sic) doesn’t occur through those channels”. For week 2, I would like to learn more about the good and bad of Bitcoin and understand it even more. The exact process of a blockchain still confuses me and I also hope to be an expert on that by the end of week 2. My expectation for going forward is with this first week under my belt my learning will be much more tailored to what I want to know about. I also will be continuing my work on a pamphlet to educate those in my community who have experienced the same absence of education on things like Bitcoin.