On the day that Bitcoin fell by 20% in value in a single day, (ie Monday Jan 11th) I recall the time I had do a TV package on BBC Newsnight when it reached a ‘crazy’ price of $50.
On the day that Bitcoin fell by 20% in value in a single day, (ie Monday Jan 11th) I recall the time I had do a TV package on BBC Newsnight when it reached a ‘crazy’ price of $50.
Amazingly I used to be a technology reporter. Before I moved to London and joined the BBC I was supposed to be some sort of expert on dot com companies and new tech.
Of course I was merely an opportunist - desperate to get into journalism and somersaulting onto the biggest bandwagon going at that time. It was 1999 and I had just quit my job as the Chief executive of a local development organisation in Wicklow. Nothing focuses the mind more than having a mortgage and not having a job. So I took a huge financial risk and set myself up as a technology reporter.
Jeremy Paxman finding out more than me about Bitcoin in 2013
The only problem was that I knew nothing about technology. Nothing at all. I had just spent the previous 4 years running a chain of pubs and restaurants in Germany. It could hardly have been any more low tech.
But, despite these seemingly huge barriers to entry, I ploughed on with my dream of getting into journalism - ideally TV journalism. I called up friends who actually did know something about software, gadgets, kit and IT and invited myself over to their places armed with 2 bottles of wine and a notebook. I sat there and fired questions at these two guys who I had known from university (and who remain among my closest of friends) about trends, developments and the most important companies in the tech world. One had worked with Intel and the other a software company which still thrives today.
Three hours and a few bottles of wine later I got home and wrote my very first article. It was about VOIP (voice of internet protocol). The following day - after I had corrected all the rioja- induced spelling and factual errors - I emailed it off to Ireland’s biggest magazine for companies : Business & Finance.
My luck continued. They were being swamped with advertisements paid for by would-be dot com companies, would-be tech hangers on and actual technology firms. They were about to start a new spin off magazine called B2B and urgently needed journalists to write for it and fill it up with ‘content’. I was just the patsy chap to do it.
Suddenly I was writing two or three articles a week about subjects that I had just read about and the rest, as they say, is history.
Fast forward 14 years to the Newsnight offices in the BBC’s New Broadcasting House. I had been the Business correspondent for two years on the show - mostly covering the fall out and recession caused by the Financial Crisis as well as the on-going Eurozone crisis.
Paying for pizza using Bitcoin - Try it in Papa Johns ;-)
When my colleague Jenny approached me with a big smile on her face, I presumed she wanted me to do another piece about what was going on in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland or Portugal. But no. She wanted me to do a story about something called Bitcoin. Apparently it had reached a shockingly high value of $50 and a bubble may be set to burst.
She rightly assumed that I knew what it was and could crack on with the story without much production help. I’m ashamed to admit I had never heard of it or Cryptocurrencies.
So I do what all journalists would do to fill a yawning gap in knowledge: I called another journalist who knew more than me. In my case I called the BBC’s Technology correspondent Rory Cellan Jones who helpfully passed me onto Cryptocurrency guru Dave Birch.
Dave Birch schooling me on cryptocurrencies at pace
He tried not to smile as he schooled me on how Bitcoin was a unit of value based on a piece of code that was written by an anonymous guy with a Japanese name a few years previously.
As you’ll see in the package, Jeremy had to draw upon his not inconsiderable acting skills to pretend he knew all about cryptocurrencies all along in the live discussion after my VT was aired.
Bitcoin reached $38,000 last week and as i write is still worth $30,000 - per bitcoin.
