Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's not just the first coin, it's the first several coins on a block. It started with 50. If you mined a block, which again happens every 10 minutes, you got 50 bitcoins in the beginning. Now I think it's down to six and a quarter. Six and a quarter, yeah, because it halves every time, which of course we will talk about how bitcoin is not an inflationary currency but it has a finite number. Slightly under 21 million will ever get mined. It uses a halving function so that every four years, the reward gets cut in half. There is only a certain amount of bitcoin that will ever be mined. You can count on the system not getting watered down by injecting more and more bitcoin into it above this very predictable, regular, declining schedule that we have observed. What you were saying, Ben, is so important. We just described the super cool system. It'd be awesome, it'd make money on the internet worth much better, it's going to require so much computing power, why would anybody do that? Why would these coins have any value? They're not dollars, they're not backed by a government. The reason is what you're just saying. The coins get created by doing the work to make the system what it is, which is really, really good. The value is in the work itself, it's a recursive system.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.