Bitcoin investors hoping to make billions may end up with a sack of fool’s gold
by Guardian Staff from Technology | The Guardian on (#39NDA)
The cryptocurrency may not be a threat to the world economy, but that should not stop regulators from protecting investors from it
Sifting the Yukon river for gold was a waste of time for most of the 100,000 prospectors seeking to make themselves rich in the 1890s. The same can be said of the bitcoin miners who dream of striking it rich by getting their hands on some of the extremely lucrative and painfully elusive electronic currency.
Relatively few people have managed to decipher the codes needed to extract bitcoins from the 21 million locked inside the mathematical problems set by its creator, the software engineer whose true identity is unknown but who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
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