Hello Steemit friends!
I belong to a Toastmasters group which is really fun. For those of you that are not familiar with what Toastmasters is, it’s basically a group that meets twice a month with the goal of helping you develop your speaking and leadership skills. It’s really fun and gives people the chance to take on different roles during each meeting designed to help people practice speaking, listening, constructive feedback and other skills.
Tomorrow, my role is to give a speech. I’ve chosen to talk about what cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are all about and why they are a benefit to our society. My goal is to provide an introduction style presentation for a non technical audience that is likely largely unaware of the whole world of cryptocurrency. Steemit is of course going to be a big part of my speech and I'm going to try to inspire the audience to try out the platform!
Now that you know my goals with the speech, I figured I would post my notes for this speech here too so you could have a look at what I'm planning to say. I won't memorize this/say it word for word or anything like that, but this is the general information and structure that I plan to follow. Also, in sharing this with you it helps me to not have to tear myself away from steemit while working on something else :)
Here's the general idea I have for my speech:
How many people have heard of the term 'Bitcoin'?
How about 'cryptocurrency'?
What about 'blockchain technology'?
Today I'm going to talk about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology and why some people believe it will completely revolutionize our world.
Bitcoin first appeared in 2009 by the mysterious, anonymous inventor (or group of inventors) named Satoshi Nakamoto. To this day, nobody knows who the real Satoshi Nakamoto is, but one thing that is for sure is that Bitcoin inspired an entirely new, thriving industry worth billions of dollars and unleashed a new, innovative technology into the world that many say will completely transform and revolutionize our world even more than the modern day internet has.
This might sound hard to believe, but after this presentation, I hope that you walk away with a solid understanding of what Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies are as well as some of the potential that exists within them to transform our world.
So, what is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. It's a system that allows people to send units of value to each other, in the form of Bitcoins, without having to go through a third party to verify the transactions. It's essentially like one person being able to directly send money to somebody else anywhere in the world as easy as you would send an email without having to have that transaction go through a bank.
A cryptocurrency is basically a digital form of currency that uses special cryptographic techniques to govern the way the units are generated as well as how the transfer of funds are verified. This really comes down to the code that determines how many at at what rate the units of value are created in the system and how the rewards are distributed out to the miners (which will be explained further soon) for verifying transactions, in terms of which miners get rewarded and by how much.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that can be used to directly purchase items and it can also be used as a store of value.
It's completely peer-to-peer, open source (which means the code behind Bitcoin is available for everybody to see and copy if they would like) and entirely transparent. Instead of one central bank that would normally verify the transaction, you have thousands of what are called 'miners' all over the world, who verify all the transactions and are rewarded by receiving Bitcoins anytime they do that. Miners are powerful computers that people have setup all over the world specifically to verify these transactions and get paid in Bitcoin for doing this. The reason why miners mine is because they can make a profit from doing this. This helps to sustain and protect the whole system.
All transactions that happen on the network are recorded and stored permanently on a public ledger known as the blockchain. The public ledger is stored and constantly updated by all of the miners on the network every time new transactions are verified. This blockchain system is very robust because of its decentralized nature. Because the ledger is stored on multiple computers all over the world, if one or more of those computers ever got knocked out, it still wouldn't destroy the Bitcoin network because of all the other computers that are there that have the full public ledger.
Bitcoin successfully showed that this new type of blockchain system can actually work. Now that this new decentralized system has been invented, people have started to think about what else could be possible by leveraging and expanding on this idea. Since Bitcoin, there's been hundreds of new coins created. Recently, there have been other types of technologies created that work to leverage the blockchain system for other uses.
It's hard to imagine what the potential of a system like this can bring. I want to end this speech by giving one example of one use case for blockchain technology that is in existence today, that is working very successfully and that I recently discovered and happen to now be completely addicted to.
It's called Steemit.
Steemit is social networking website that leverages the power of blockchain technology to reward comments and posts that are deemed valuable to the steemit community. In this way, people can blog and interact with others within the community by posting comments on other people's blogs, and essentially earn tokens, called Steem, anytime anybody else upvotes any blog post or comment they make. Steem is a cryptocurrency that can be traded on various cryptocurrency exchanges for other cryptocurrencies or other fiat currencies.
One of the beautiful things about steemit is that it allows anybody, anywhere in the world to start blogging on the site, completely for free, with the potential to make a profit if other people upvote their posts. This new revenue model is only made possible because of the invention of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Essentially, the steem tokens are getting created by the cryptographic rules set in place by the code and the rewards are distributed to the community based on the number of votes each community member receives for their posts. This is very different from what we would think of as the usual revenue models for blogs on youtube for example, where a popular youtuber would be able to generate revenue from advertisers wanting to advertising on their channel.
This has created a fantastic opportunity for anybody to start getting paid for the content they create based on how valuable that content is deemed within the community. Steemit has only been in existence of a little over a year and is still in its beta phase, but already been transforming people's lives and literally lifting some people out of poverty, many of whom live in third world countries where there are limited job opportunities.
This is just the beginning of new concepts like steemit and other blockchain based technologies that haven't even been dreamed up yet. I hope my speech today has helped make this whole world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology a little more clear and maybe even encouraged some of you to get excited and dream about what might be possible with this, as I've found myself doing more and more.
Thank you.
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