Don't understand bitcoin? You are not alone

My own journey with bitcoin started many years ago and then a friend suggested I get a mining rig and put it in my garage to generate my own bitcoin. I toyed with the idea; looked up rigs which were running at about £13k then and considered putting some also in my attic. However life got in the way and this was no bad thing. The mining industry was quickly being taken over by larger operations pushing out smaller operators. I probably saved myself some heart ache and some large electricity bills. Despite this, which on reflection is very classic crypto, with wild #FOMO always ready to run, I made the decision to educate myself on crypto and fintech with the SAID business school at Oxford University. A very tough course working with professional people from all sorts of worlds like insurance and government, we undertook a thorough review of the players in blockchain who turned out to be some of the biggest tech names with the biggest budgets to throw at this phenomena in the world. My takeaway from this course was WOW. It was like discovering an underworld. I just knew I had to get involved. Since then I have seen that coding is integral to this world in terms of the language that is used; and it helps to have an understanding of economics. There are different areas which "work," for instance trading coins - buying low, selling high and now staking coins almost like seed funding new operations for rewards; DEFI which is lending and of course NFT's have sprung up like a tsunami creating sales at $2.5bn in the first quarter of 2021. Confused? Don't be. Much of the confusion around crypto has surfaced because the industry has reversed out from technical people into more facebook style interfaces. So much of the original content and coverage was about the technical details of blockchain operation which is something you really, really don't need to know about. It is good to know to hold your own but I own a mini and drive around effortlessly with zero understanding of its engine operation or interest franky. As long as it works. I think this is the way to think about bitcoin. It is based on logic and safety systems like those used in airplanes to keep us in the air. Apart from that you can buy it, save it, spend it and talk about it: bragging rights. You can go deeper and read some books about it but you can also just operate simply. A depth of knowledge is not required unless you want a trading career or are setting up a fund. Then it is really more like the investment world: watch the crypto financial markets and Telegram and Twitter like a hawk for good and bad news which impact its prices up and down very quickly. Customer service for all the wallets is on Reddit. Faster than any call centre I've used for banks or telecoms. So if anyone talks too technically about bitcoin. Just remember its a super clever system to ping coins to people without a bank involved. Download Coinbase and one other wallet and just do some transfers to get to grips with its functionality. You never know where that might lead. I'm now commissioning my own corporate NFT's for Citywealth 😂