Dear LPG,

I, my grandson and my tablet were taking part in a three way conversation the other day while he was giving me a few pointers about how to search more successfully on Google, when  the subject of money came up and how to best make sure that you become what he called ‘financially successful’.

He is only 23 and may know more than me about computers I thought, but I have been around a lot longer than him and know more about life.  I started reminiscing about gold being the age old way forward.  I found a website which informed that there were gold coins as far back as 550 BC.  I reminded him of all those American westerns where the prospectors would be mining for gold a couple of hundred years ago but he just rolled his eyes. Property, and real estate, was the way that people amassed it in the ‘not so long ago good old days’ and I threw that in for good measure.

He then mentioned the way we are likely to spend money in the future.  I told him that the UK is likely to always have Stirling, but he told me that I was behind the times.  “What about the Bitcoin”, he asked.  And I said “Never mind ‘What about the Bitcoin’, what is a Bitcoin?”

This is when my lesson started.  He explained that this is a virtual currency that gets mined but not with a prospecting sieve.

Apparently this is a virtual commodity, and if you want to mine it, you will have to buy a serious amount of expensive computer equipment to do the mining for you.  He tells me that this is the currency that we may all be using to buy, sell and measure our wealth in the future. At this point I was very glad that the tablet was a part of our conversation because, although we looked it up, I am still having a bit of a job getting my head around all the information we found.

I am passing some of what my tablet explained on, because when one of the youngsters in your family mentions the word ‘Bitcoin’, if you read some of the information we found you will not appear as ignorant as I did during my conversation, even if you don’t actually understand all the details.

DL, Greenwich

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