Tech Tuesday: Bitcoin and the Winklevoss Twins

One thing for certain, progress has altered the pace of life dramatically. Since we're living in the midst of the whirlwind we can hardly grasp it. At one time books were transcribed by hand. You can see the process of production in The Name of the Rose, a film based on Umberto Eco's novel of the same name.

The printing press was a revolutionary technological development, instrumental in the Reformation movement that fractured the power of Rome as it could rapidly reproduce the "Word of God" in the language of common people. This also became the impetus behind literacy and ultimately developments in education.
, but when you take a birds-eye view of history's timeline you see it vividly. Before the printing press, books were hand-scribed. You can catch a glimpse of those early days of publishing in

Advances in transportation technology in the 19th and 20th centuries brought faraway places near. Before the transcontinental railroad it took six months to reach California from New York, if you survived the journey at all. Telegraph and telephone technologies made simultaneous communication possible, connecting markets and peoples in unprecedented ways.

Fast forward to the Internet, and further to the wireless universe.

As for publishing, I remember when the Jonestown massacre occurred. I was working in a bookstore in Puerto Rico at the time. A book about Jim Jones was written and published within a month of the tragedy. This seemed startling at the time, though in retrospect the author had no doubt been accumulating his stories, stats and anecdotes for quite a while.

That story came to mind when I watched The Social Network, a film based on a book about the founding of Facebook. There were a number of takeaways, not least of which was how quickly an idea could become a business that turned a student into a billionaire.

Mark Zuckerberg came out on top as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were left holding the short end of the stick. A subsequent lawsuit enabled them to pocket a cool 66 million dollars in a settlement. And since these were Harvard boys, they weren't going to do something stupid the next time around.

As it turns out, the Winklevoss twins become early adopters of another new technology: cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and its ilk have produced plenty of headlines this past year since the valuation of a single coin flew to more than 11 thousand greenbacks over the winter. Hard to believe, but at one time 10,000 Bitcoin units were traded for two pizzas. Do the math.

I have a friend who has been trying to determine the best investment play in this new tech development. In reading up on it all I learned that as early as 2013 the Winklevoss brothers had collected 1% of all the Bitcoin in the world. I further learned that Bitcoin has been around for ten years and cryptocurrency explorations for ten more years before that.

What the Winklevoss twins seemed to be aiming at was to create an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) into which ordinary investors could throw money in order to profit from the potential exponential growth of crypto. Such a fund would enable people to invest without understanding the technobabble behind these new high tech currencies. In July the SEC quashed this, citing concerns about the potential for manipulation and hype of this new investment instrument. My guess is it's only a matter of time...

You can read more about this story here:
Bitcoin, the Winklevoss Twins and Money Tech

What's your take on cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin?

Related Links
My 2013 review of The Social Network
What the World's Central Banks Are Saying about Cryptocurrencies
"Nine years since the birth of Bitcoin, central banks around the world are increasingly recognizing the potential upsides -- and downsides -- of digital currencies."

Meantime, life goes on...