make an effort to understand what cryptocurrency is, what money is and why precious metals have served as money historically. Crypto-currency or digital currency has been around for a long time, but in 2009 a white paper was relelased on the cipherpunks board by a pseudoname, "Satoshi Nakamoto". This paper described a new and interesting protocol to create a fungible, immutable digital token with the similar properties to the primary alternative that has served as money throughout history; Gold. All changes and upgrades to the protocol should strive to maintain and reinforce these Principles of Bitcoin 21 million coins will be mined in total, so the protocol provides scarcity. No censorship: Nobody should be able to prevent valid txs from being confirmed. Open-Source: Bitcoin source code should always be open for anyone to read, modify, copy, share. Permissionless: No arbitrary gatekeepers should ever prevent anybody from being part of the network (user, node, miner, etc). Pseudonymous: No ID should be required to own, use Bitcoin. Fungible: All coins are equal and should be equally spendable. Irreversible Transactions: Confirmed blocks should be set in stone. Blockchain History should be immutable. These properties were unique in that no previous attempt at digital money could solve the double-spend problem, but this new idea presented a block chain (merkle tree model, using sha256 hashing algorithms to secure immutability), whereby the entirety of all mined tokens could be verified. There are continuous and expanding attempts to hijack the protocol, which has thus far been proven unbreakable and grows more secure by the day. I spent many years rejecting this idea as "nerd money" and thought that gold and silver should be used to restrict privately owned central banks from stealing the peoples life blood though inflation / deflation cycles. I was wrong and now see that this protocol is allowing people in the farthest reaches of the planet to independently survive and thrive when their governments strip them of their wealth via fiat currency manipulation. This protocol is the first time that money has evolved in 5000 years. Rothchild agents can control precious metals supply, but this protocol has already past an event horizon that makes central control impossible.