Recently, I was contacted by a student in Ireland via Twitter asking for information on the demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds of “typical” holders, users and investors of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It was only at this point I realized I didn’t have a good enough answer for him.

It’s not like I hadn't thought about it. In fact, it had become a bit of a fun pastime of mine to ask other people how they would describe such a person, on a purely curious and anecdotal basis, whenever the chance came up in conversation. …

Prologue:

While this article can be enjoyed as a standalone piece, it is best read in conjunction with this earlier article that deals with another negatively perceived aspect of Bitcoin mining, namely power consumption.

The key points that can be taken from that piece are:

• Bitcoin mining is a huge industry that is growing rapidly, but has three significant environmental concerns which are: power consumption, heat generation and recycling of equipment.
• Whilst it’s true that power consumption is currently a problem, it is argued that it is not as big as it is made out to be and there are even…

I recently wrote an article about how Bitcoin’s mining operations could ultimately end up being good for the planet.

Some considered it controversial and pointed me to various facts and surveys indicating how damaging it is, many of which I had considered when doing research for the piece.

They’re right, of course. There’s little doubt that if we carried on down the existing path, Bitcoin’s mining impact could have a significantly adverse effect on the planet in the long term.

But the overriding point made in that article is that I firmly believe that the path we’ll ultimately end up…

It’s quite stressful having skin in the game in a bear market.

You watch your net worth drop — sometimes dramatically and sometimes by the minute like some sort of slow-motion financial car crash — and wonder what the right call is.

Do you realize that paper loss and walk away, poorer in money terms, but (perhaps) richer in experience? Or hold on and keep your faith in whatever asset or product it is that you believe in?

The answer is an almost impossible calculation of variables, probabilities, emotions, and personal circumstances unique to each individual playing the game.

But…

I’ve been writing and talking about Bitcoin for some years now and I can always tell what stage of a market cycle we’re in by the questions I’m asked and how frequently I’m asked them.

Most of the time, for example, if I’m out with a group of friends or colleagues (back in the days when you could actually do this) Bitcoin will not be mentioned for fear that I should “go off on one” for a solid ten minutes or so. …

Most if us are lucky enough to have had a childhood where we experienced at least once the joy of opening a birthday or Christmas card and watching with excitement as a currency note fluttered to the ground. It was usually a small denomination, but in our minds, we were rich!

Many of us still use notes in cards as gifts at special times of year, but as we grow older we find that we’re now the ones providing them rather than receiving them, such as it should be.

So while the process for cash is well proven and millions…

Back in the 1990s I was directly involved with driving the adoption of the internet. Since then, the internet has developed into something very different from how we imagined it. It’s also considerably better than we thought it would be.

While we dreamed of the giddy possibilities of a face-to-face video phone call or downloading a piece of software on demand, we never, ever imagined web 3.0 apps like Uber or Airbnb. They were so far off the scale, they didn’t even register.

Bitcoin’s journey (and ours with it) is likely to be similar in the end, and some of…

With only 21 million bitcoin ever going to be available, the logical conclusion is that we will “run out” of bitcoin if, for example, 21 million people decide they want to own one.

In fact, the situation is even worse than that since it will take another 120 years to mine the last 3.5 million coins and we’ve collectively lost somewhere between 3.5 and 4 million coins (source: Chainalysis), almost certainly for good. In our lifetime, therefore, the best we can hope for is around 16 million coins being available.

Maybe.

Because even that assumes the early adopters with large…