Mature Life Features

. . . for Bocce ball

Friday 11 a.m. poolside.

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What . . .

. . .do vegetarians count

to go to sleep?

Heads of lettuce?

Cucumbers?

Pumpkins?

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Only Your Computer Knows Virtual Money

It’s a tenet of investing: if you don’t understand the company or product and what it does, drop it and move on to something else. Which makes the Bitcoin story bizarre. Not only is it understood by a select group of financial high flyers, no one is really sure who started it.

Since the Bitcoin’s birth a dozen years ago, it’s travelled a bumpy road the stretches from a price of $400 five years ago to more than $60,000 about a year ago. Along the way it dropped to $4,000 in 2019 from $19,000 two years earlier.

The value of Bitcoin rises only if there’s a demand for it. If no one wants it, the value drops dramatically.

If Bitcoin sounds a bit scary, there are more than 6,500 other cryptocurrencies on the market.

If Bitcoin doesn’t catch our fancy, you can purchase Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar, Polkadot or Cardano among the thousands of other options.

None of these currencies involve printing presses. They exist only in computers – cyberspace.

There is a growing industry servicing the spending of Bitcoins after you buy them. They’re readily available at thousands of automated teller machines around the country.

And there’s a whole new language involved.

For example, Ethereum claims to be “a decentralized software platform that enables smart contracts and decentralized applications (dapps) to be built and run without any downtime, fraud, control, or interference from a third party.

“The goal behind Ethereum is to create a decentralized suite of financial products that anyone in the world can freely access, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or faith.”

Did you get all that?

Transactions are conducted through a digital ledger called a blockchain. This involves a worldwide computer network that stores the virtual money in a digital wallet.

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