Cryptocurrencies, as the name implies, are digital or virtual currencies. Perhaps one of their advantages is that they can be used on a business-to-business or on an individual-to-individual basis. We are talking, in other words about point-to-point -or direct- payments, without the help of an intermediary, such as a bank
I performed an experiment with some of my acquaintances and friends because, as a counselor, I am interested in the psychological side of free rewards. I sent out a message to ten of them. I told them that there is a web browser that allows you to mine Bitcoins for free. For those who don’t know what this means, very briefly, over-simplified and without going into technical details: mining for cryptocurrency means, basically, running certain algorithms on computers to create new coins. There is only a finite number of coins available, hence their increase in value. Coming back to my story, you get rewarded with Bitcoins for running said browser -hence mining Bitcoins-on your computer (I will leave details about this at the end of the article, for those of you interested in more details). Free money is on offer, you would think they were all queuing up to know how to go about it, right?