BerkeleyX: CS198.1x Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies
Does paying someone to store your money sound absurd? Someone else making money on your hard earned money? You have to keep minimum balances, transaction fees and all the wait to get your own money...Yikes. Gone are those days.
Up until recently there was no alternative to banks. But we do now and it's much better. It's called Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin(type of crypto) is a digital wallet - accessible anywhere (you need only internet) and very safe.
The amount of money i.e. USD maps to amount of bitcoins you have. Just like money, you can earn bitcoins by process of mining(instead of humans, it's computers working on a long task). Everyone knows your public id (like your home address) with which they can send you bitcoins. Only you know your private id (like your home key) with which you can access/manage your funds. You would never give out your home key to any stranger. All folks who use Bitcoin maintain a ledger (who sent how many bitcoins to whom). You would ask, why do I need to know that? That's how Bitcoin keeps track of what transactions are legit and not fraud. There is a transaction record for everything. Your monthly bank statements are now stored in what is called Blockchain.
Bitcoin was designed as '1 CPU 1 vote' ideology. When it was designed, Satoshi intended for people to contribute towards mining bitcoins in a fair way. This is no longer the case.
ASICs are Application Specific Integrated Circuits which are custom made for solving a complex task. These devices are much more powerful than the average CPU/GPU available in the market for general use. Since these ASICs are very expensive, folks who can spend huge amounts of $ buying these get an unfair advantage in mining coins faster. The analogy which I would like to make here is, 'the rich get richer'. I believe, everyone should be given a fair chance of mining bitcoins in a fair way. Use of ASICs should not be allowed as it promotes unfair use of power (which only the wealthy can afford) thus leaving the common folks behind. It concentrates power with the wealthy (only those with ASICs can create blocks and would eventually take over the majority of network) which is fundamentally against the de-centralization theory.
I'm not against ASICs or other low powered silicon pushing hardwares. Different flavors of cryptocurrency use different mining techniques which ASICs can't handle. Once invested, it's hard to break away from use of ASIC in cryptocurrency as one would want return of investment. ASIC's should be left for general purpose computing wherein it can find other uses (telemetry, space exploration and other challenges which are time consuming to solve).