Tuesday, 9 December 2014

Talk: Bitcoin – Everything you were afraid to ask … and more!

Join us for a two part discussion on Bitcoin by Andrew Sheppard. Andrew (“Shep”) is a consultant on Wall Street who works in the areas of Big Data and Big Compute. He is also a part-time professor teaching on the Masters in Financial Engineering (MFE) program at Baruch College.



Bitcoin is a new form of electronic cash growing in popularity. As a system it is a protocol, a P2P network, and a bunch of cryptographic algorithms. Oh, and add a new form of global currency to that list. In short, Bitcoin is a bundle of technology and economic concepts all rolled into one.


Bitcoin is also like the tooth fairy: most have heard about it, but few have actually encountered it for real. And even those who have actually encountered Bitcoin don’t really know what it is at a basic (read “fundamental”) level; in particular, too emphasis is placed on the technology and not enough on the economics of Bitcoin, though both are highly novel. This talk remedies that.



Reserve a seat, it’s FREE






In fact, this talk is really two talks over the space of one evening:


1. MONEY: In this talk we’ll explore the nature of money and wealth. Bitcoin was created to solve a problem: the storage and transfer of value in a distributed peer-to-peer fashion based on no-trust. But to fully understand what that problem is, you must understand money. Most people don’t. This first talk provides a deep understanding of the concept of money from an historical perspective; a few thousand years worth of history.


2. BITCOIN: The second talk will explain how Bitcoin works from a technology perspective. In quite some detail. Finally, Bitcoin implies an economic future that is different to how the world works now. A future which, whether Bitcoin succeeds or fails, will be very different. This talk with explore some obvious – and some non-obvious – ways in which the world might change.







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