I will begin by telling you one of my great regrets. I set up my computer to mine Bitcoin when the prices were still in the hundreds of US dollars. After having no luck alone, I joined a mining pool. The pool struck a coin and I was awarded a share. I withdrew it to a wallet and checked it's price was around $0.90c, and then read an article that said that the cost of mining in electricity was more than the value of Bitcoin you would mine. On this basis I stopped mining. I never backed up the seed words. I forgot about my Bitcoin, like so many, until the media caught on and Bitcoin mania occurred. Then I went back to try to recover my fraction of a coin, only to find that in the course of a reinstall (after buying my first SSD) I had lost the wallet file somewhere on my computer (and after much searching can only speculate that I deleted it accidentally), and had no way to recover the wallet address, though to this day I remember the password.

So I have had an interest in Bitcoin for quite some time, since before it blew up, although I didn't benefit from the knowledge as much as many -  curse that stupid article about electricity. Every few days at least I type "1BTC in USD" into my web-browser and have a look at the prices and movement. So when coronavirus tanked the global stock-market and the price of crypto recently, I finally bit the bullet and decided to make an investment and to try to obtain around 10 millibits (which is 1/100th of a BTC or roughly USD$88). As this is no small amount of money for me, I decided to find an exchange which had a good reputation. I found one in Australia called International Reserve, which was reliable for me.

Two things occurred at this point: fees and slow transaction times. The only way for me to fund my International Reserve account was through an IMT (International Money Transfer), which cost me NZD$15, and the money took 2 business days to get there. I was lucky and in fact benefited slightly from the delay in terms of exchange rate, but it became clear to me that faster international transactions are becoming more and more necessary, and in fact, the need to have faster transfers across borders is part of what drove the creation and success of Bitcoin in the first place.

That's the end of part one. To be continued tomorrow... Continued here.