Israel Keys, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Bloom Solutions, on everything you need to know about crypto
As the co-founder of Bloom Solutions, one of the first licensed and regulated cryptocurrency exchanges under the Central Bank of the Philippines, Israel Keys knows his Bitcoin from his Dogecoin.
Bloom Solutions was also one of the first to offer a service enabling people to use crypto to send remittance payments in the Philippines, a market with huge potential given that payments sent home by the Philippines' 2.2 million overseas workers account for more than 10 percent of the country's GDP.
This year, Bloom is launching a platform that will enable Filipinos to use pesos to purchase over 250 cryptocurrencies.
Here, Keys helps demystify the topic and break down the jargon, answering some of the most common questions people have about cryptocurrency.
1. What is the blockchain? Why is it so secure?
The word blockchain describes the way information is structured and stored—blocks of information that are linked, or chained, together in a sequence.
The technology more broadly makes use of cryptography, or mathematical techniques, to encrypt information to ensure privacy and verifiability. These techniques are used to order the blocks in the chain and make them tamper-proof. As the chain of blocks gets larger it becomes increasingly difficult and next to impossible to make changes to the information stored in each block—making them “immutable” or unchangeable. Combining cryptography with decentralisation makes the information stored on a blockchain system safer and more secure than traditional information systems.
See also: This Man Was One Of Russia’s Most Famous Composers. Now He’s A Crypto-Capitalist