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Photo: Benjamin gz / Imaginechina / AP
Last week, the value of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin briefly exceeded the $ 40,000 mark, then dropped to almost $ 30,000 and then climbed back to the 40,000 mark.
It doesn't look like a currency.
But what is the Bitcoin then?
And how should investors deal with it?
The anarchists' dream
The restaurant was called Café Zapata and was located in a property occupied by artists on Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin-Mitte.
There you could pay for your beer with an artificial currency more than 20 years ago.
The artificial currency was above all an expression of the political distrust of the system.
So the impulse of distrust has been there for a long time.
The idea of a currency that was not controlled by the state fell on fertile ground in the left-wing hacker community.
Allegedly it was a Japanese computer scientist who described the code for the new cryptocurrency in 2007 - and which has not yet been identified.
Behind this is the idea of being able to replace government guarantees with cryptography, open source and mutual control.
To this day, anyone can donate bitcoins to left-wing projects such as the Wauholland Foundation and WikiLeaks.
The same goes for projects related to the open source movement like Wikipedia.
But the truth also includes: right-wing extremist projects also like Bitcoin, just like blackmailers.
I didn't have any myself in the first ten years of Bitcoin history, but I was already fascinated by the idea: Bitcoins, the anarchist money for young people who did not trust the state.
In the focus of the stock market world
Then the bitcoin disappeared from my sight.
Until 2017, when Bitcoin made a name for itself as an object of speculation in the world of stock market traders.
Its value rose from $ 1,000 to nearly $ 20,000 within a year.
I learned that you can produce this currency by running complex (cryptographic) arithmetic work on your computer - the so-called Bitcoin mining.
And that the operators of server farms concentrated on computer work to mine the new "currency" Bitcoin.
And that the energy consumption of Bitcoin miners and computers reached the level of entire countries - currently at the level of Austria, by the way.
So if, like me, the climate is important to you, the amount of effort involved will horrify you.
So some shook their heads at such speculations, others got the speculation really hot and the third slowly understood that the idea of blockchain behind it could be of great value, especially beyond this gamble.
Budding mathematicians invited me as a consumer journalist to the Humboldt University in Berlin, where they argued about the value of different blockchain processes.
And a well-deserved "financial tip" employee who has been dealing with cryptocurrencies for years sent me a few Bitcoin shares on my cell phone.
"But if you have to be careful if you lose the key (the key) for your wallet (account), then the Bitcoin share is gone." In keeping with this, hackers at the annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club made fun of it, common ones To crack encryption tricks for the crypto currency (You can see the presentation "Wallet Fail" on the insecurity of such wallets here.)
Since then, my smartphone has been lying safely in my desk.
You shouldn't give the device with the encrypted code to Bitcoin out of your hand.
In everyday life I've been using a new one for years.
Just as quickly as the hype came in 2017, it seemed to end again.
Bitcoin's value fell from $ 20,000 to $ 3,500 in 2018 - a loss of 82 percent.
The currency fluctuations between the dollar and the euro, which consumer advocates are usually referred to, are practically irrelevant against the background.
The British "Independent" reported on a study by two well-known US professors.
Tenor: The whole price hype of 2017 was essentially due to a single speculator.
After the hype is before the hype
At the end of 2017 I wrote at this point: Blockchain is future technology and Bitcoin is unfortunately still mostly gambling.
In fact, Facebook wanted to launch a currency like this in 2019, the Libra.
The European Central Bank (ECB) and other central banks began to seriously consider the idea of their own digital currency.
Insurance companies - traditionally employing many mathematicians - discussed the benefits of blockchain for their computer processes.
And then, in autumn 2020, speculation really started again.
It has little to do with currency, with money as a payment function.
You can rarely pay with Bitcoins in everyday life because the value fluctuates so much.
Even if Lieferando in Berlin now offers pizza for bitcoins.
Or for a fraction of it.
Anyone who is worried that inflation will eat up, say five percent of the hard-earned wealth year after year, does not want to have the 100,000 euros stored for old age in such a way that it is 100,000 one day, 15,000 at the end of the year and again a year later 200,000.
He does not want to put himself in the hands of speculators like John McAfee, who expected the Bitcoin price to be at one million dollars at the end of 2020.
This is the one who founded the virus protection company in 1987 and then sold it:
But the debate won't go away again.
The Reuters news agency counts over 8,000 "cryptocurrencies" this week.
The European Central Bank (ECB) calls on interested citizens to discuss the concept of a digital currency with it.
And contactless payment with crypto currencies without state traceability retains its old anarchist charm for the supporters, the amiable as the criminal.
Who will win?
So the future of bitcoin is still completely open.
Will it become a legitimate currency one day?
Is it banned?
Will another cryptocurrency win the race?
Facebook's Libra project is now called Diem and is now supposed to start this year.
Or will Bitcoins remain objects of speculation in which the beginners finance the profits of the professionals?
What that means for you is: get involved with the technology because it is fascinating and can be used for very different things than making payments, such as healthcare.
Health insurance companies, for example, dream of using blockchain technology to control the quality of drugs, for example.
In this way, the cold chain could be monitored from manufacture through the transport route to delivery and saved on the product.
"If the cold chain is not adhered to, the drug will not be delivered."
But operate your investments away from the crypto currency hype - very solid, very future-proof, so that after hard work you can certainly fulfill your wishes, when you want it and when you had planned it.
To do this, you need a call money account, a fixed-term deposit account and, if you like, a custody account with market-wide, global ETFs.
And even if PayPal allows you to pay for things with Bitcoins in the future, which are then transferred in euros, dollars or kroner, you will not change your attitude.
Your furniture store will still not sell the leather sofa for a Bitcoin price, the price would be far too volatile for that.
And you will not be able to buy a property at a fixed Bitcoin price with such volatile prices.
You see dealing with Bitcoin itself as a computer game.
For this you need clear rules of the game and a game master who also abides by and can keep to the rules.
This is less trivial than it sounds.
Even if some crypto exchanges are now regulated by the state and an official Bafin license is required in Germany for crypto custodians, i.e. the custodians of crypto keys for other owners, such as those operated by the Stuttgart stock exchange.
And when you play, that is, gamble a little for money, you bet exactly as much as you would for any other computer game.
Icon: The mirror
