doing something a little different today
today we are talking to Andrew Levine and Andrew Levine is a team member at steam it I've talked about steam it a little bit the David Pakman show is now publishing content to steam it and it's been a very interesting experience so far and really what what this kind of exposed to me
andrew is as we got into this and saw interest from others is that I really just haven't talked enough about cryptocurrency more generally on my program and I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about steam it but really first to talk a little bit about cryptocurrency more generally so for people who have maybe heard the term Bitcoin and the term cryptocurrency but don't really understand what we're talking about why don't we start there I mean first and foremost what what is a cryptocurrency as opposed to just a currency like US dollars or Euros or whatever else yeah sure that's a great question first I just want to thank you for having me on and giving me this opportunity and for seeing the the potential and the vision for the future that we at steam at have so thank you as far as what cryptocurrency is I think that the word currency in there often leads to a lot of confusion and really all a cryptocurrency is is a unique it's a protocol for creating unique tokens sequences of numbers and letters that who supply can be controlled by an algorithm so to compare it to systems like the United States dollar or the Euro the system we have in place for that is called central bank's and they're the ones who handle the creation of tokens and they keep track of where
the tokens are and they ensure that nobody is creating duplicates and you know they're the authority that keeps track of all the transactions so crypto currencies are effectively new technology that leverages peer-to-peer networking proto calls to serve the functions that were previously served by central banks okay so let's pause there because even there I think it's possible we may
already lose some people so sure some of the functions that a central bank might have which is sort of verification of the authenticity of currency establishing the parameters of how that currency will work and sort of what how it will be transacted that in a sense by cryptocurrency can be can we say out sourced I know decentralized is a word socialized in some way is is that are those tasks being spread across the community of users of that currency yes that's exactly right it's combining those those are all good words to try to wrap your mind around this seemingly complex technology it leverages new developments in computer technology although they're not that new actually like cryptography was primarily developed during World War two so it takes cryptography and then it combines it with the same technology that you would have used in something like LimeWire or utorrent you know these peer-to-peer networking clients that allow us to share data so you combine peer-to-peer networking with cryptography and what that enables you to do is create algorithms that basically print money in the form of these unique tokens and then keep track of it and then the entire network so so they're like highly dedicated
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