Glenn Beck, a conservative radio political commentator and former CNN host, recently spoke about his visit to Silicon Valley, technological development, business and investment and the peer-to-peer decentralized virtual currency bitcoin on the May 5 edition of the “Glenn Beck Program.”
Beck, who has been known to flip flop on a wide variety of political issues, told his listening audience that he would “absolutely invest in bitcoin.”
The hosts discussed the fact that bitcoin holdings and identities can be hacked and stolen, but so can many other things, too. Also, bank deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), but as Beck noted, if the financial institutions go bust then United States dollars won’t be worth much anyway.
They described bitcoin as being “unconventional” and “different” because there are no financial institutions, central banks and currency. Beck said that bitcoins are essentially “clams” and web developers and consumers decided they were going to use “clams over the Internet.”
He went on to explain that there are relatively no fees associated with the virtual currency.
Beck warned that bitcoin developers are threatening the Federal Reserve and central banks all over the world – adding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) on that list since they recently announced that bitcoin is a commodity rather than a currency.
During one element of the interview, one of the hosts somewhat incorrectly described how to mine for bitcoins. For the modern day gold digger, an individual operates computer software (open source and free to download) and specialized hardware and the computer then solves complex mathematical algorithms. Bitcoins can also be bought on an exchange or accepting them for goods and services.
Right now, there are 12 million bitcoins in circulation and a finite number of 21 million will ever be mined.
In the end, Beck and his colleagues say bitcoin is “very, very free market.”
