Pratique du Shadowing: What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin Explained Simply - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

Welcome to 99Bitcoins.com.

I'm Nate Martin and I'll be your guide through this video series Bitcoin Whiteboard Tuesday.

We're going to cover a lot of topics such as Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin wallets, how to trade Bitcoin and a lot more.

Today we're going to start from scratch and answer the third most searched term on Google today, what is Bitcoin?

If you’re worried that we’re going to get too technical and use a lot of complicated words, don’t.

Here at 99Bitcoins we translate Bitcoin into plain English so even if you have no technical background you’ll be able to understand everything.

By the end of this course, you’ll know more about Bitcoin and how it works than 99% of the population.

So let’s get started… Before we talk about Bitcoin I want to take a moment and talk about money.

What is money exactly?

At its core, money represents value.

If I do some work for you, you give me money in exchange for the value I gave you.

I can then use that money to get something of value from someone else in the future.

Throughout history, value has taken many forms and people used a lot of different materials to represent money.

Salt, wheat, shells and of course gold have all been used as a medium of exchange.

However, in order for something to represent value people have to trust that it is indeed valuable and will stay valuable long enough for them to redeem that value in the future.

Up until a hundred years ago or so we always trusted in someTHING to represent money.

However something happened along the way and we’ve changed our trust model from trusting someTHING to trusting in someONE.

Let me explain.

Over time, people found it too cumbersome to walk around the world carrying bars of gold or other forms of money, so paper money was invented.

Here’s how it worked: a bank or government would offer to take possession of your bar of gold; let’s say worth $1000, and in return, that bank would give you receipt certificates, which we call bills, amounting to $1000.

Not only were these pieces of paper much easier to carry, but you could spend a dollar on a cup of coffee and not have to cut your gold bar into a thousand pieces.

And if you wanted your gold back, you simply took $1000 in bills back to the bank to redeem them for the actual form of money, in this case that gold bar, whenever you needed… And so, paper began its use as money as an instrument of practicality and convenience.

However as time progressed, and due to macroeconomic changes, this bond between the paper receipt and the gold it stands for was broken.

Now, to explain the path that led us away from the gold standard is extremely complex, but suffice to say that governments told their people that the government itself would be liable for the value of that paper money.

Basically we all said “let’s just forget about gold and trade paper instead”.

So people continued to trade with receipts that are backed by nothing but the government’s promise.

And why did that continue to work?

Well, because of trust.

Even though there is no actual commodity backing paper money, people trusted the government and that’s how fiat money was created.

Fiat is a Latin word that means “by decree”.

Meaning the dollars, or euros or any other currency for that matter have value because the government orders it to.

It’s what is known as “legal tender” - coins or banknotes that must be accepted if offered as payment.

So the value of today’s money actually comes from a legal status given to it by a central authority, in this case, the government.

And so the trust model has changed, from trusting someTHING to trusting someONE, in this case, the government.

Fiat money has two main drawbacks: 1. It is centralized: You have a central authority that controls and issues it.

In this case the government or central bank.

And two, it is not limited by quantity: The government or central bank can print as much as they want whenever needed and inflate the money supply on the market.

The problem with printing money is that because you’re flooding the market with more money the value of each dollar drops, so your own money is worth less.

When you see prices rising throughout the years it’s not necessarily that prices are rising as much as that the purchasing power of your money is dropping.

You need more dollars to buy something that used to “cost less”.

Once fiat money was in place, the move to digital money was pretty simple.

We already have a central authority that issues money, so why not make money mostly digital and let that authority keep track of who owns what.

Today we mainly use credit cards, wire transfers, Paypal and others forms of digital money.

The amount of physical money in the world is almost negligible and is getting smaller with each year that passes.

So if money today is digital, how does that even work?

I mean, if I have a file that represents a dollar, what’s to stop me from copying it a million times and having a million dollars?

This is called the “double spend problem”.

The solution that banks use today is a “centralized” solution; they keep a ledger on their computer which keeps track of who owns what.

Everyone has an account and this ledger keeps a tally for each account.

We all trust the bank and the bank trusts their computer, and so the solution is centralized on this ledger in this computer.

You may not know this, but there were many attempts to create alternative forms of digital currencies, however none were successful in solving the double spend problem without a central authority.

Whenever you give a anyone control over the money supply you’re giving them enormous power and this creates three major issues: The first issue is corruption; power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

When banks have a mandate to create money, or value, they basically control the flow of value in the world, which gives them almost unlimited power.

A small example of how power corrupts can be seen in the Wells Fargo’s scandal where employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts in order to inflate the bank’s revenue stream, without their customers knowing about it for years.

The second issue of a centralised system is mismanagement.

If the central authority’s interest isn’t aligned with the people it controls there may be a case of mismanagement of the money.

For example, printing a lot of money in order to save a certain bank or institution from collapsing, as what happened in 2008.

The problem with printing too much money is that it causes inflation and basically erodes the value of the citizen’s money.

One extreme example for this is Venezuela, where the government has printed so much money, and the value of it has dropped so much, that people are no longer counting money but are weighing it instead.

The last issue is control.

You are basically giving away all control of your money to the government or bank.

At any point in time the government can decide to freeze your account and deny you access to your funds.

Even if you use only cold hard cash the government can cancel the legal status of your currency as was done in India a few years back.

This was the state of things until 2009.

Creating an alternative to the current monetary system seemed like a lost cause.

But then everything changed….

In October 2008 a document was published online by a guy calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto.

The document, also called a whitepaper, suggested a way of creating a system for a decentralised currency called Bitcoin.

This system claimed to create digital money that solves the double spend problem without the need for a central authority.

At its core Bitcoin is a transparent ledger without a central authority, but what does this confusing phrase even really mean?

Well, let’s compare Bitcoin to the bank.

Since most money today is already digital, the bank basically manages its own ledger of balances and transactions.

However the bank’s ledger is not transparent and it is stored on the bank’s main computer.

You can’t sneak a peek into the bank’s ledger, and only the bank has complete control over it.

Bitcoin on the other hand is a transparent ledger.

At any point in time I can sneak a peek into the ledger and see all of the transactions and balances that are taking place.

The only thing you can’t figure out is who owns these balances and who is behind each transaction.

This means Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous; everything is open, transparent and trackable but you still can’t tell who is sending what to whom.

Let’s explain this with an example.

You can see on your screen certain rows from Bitcoin’s ledger.

We can see that a certain Bitcoin address sent 10,000 Bitcoins to another Bitcoin address in May of 2010.

This specific transaction is the first purchase that was ever made with Bitcoin and it was used to buy 2 pizzas by a guy named Laszlo.

Laszlo published a post back in 2010 asking for someone to sell him 2 pizzas in exchange for 10,000 Bitcoins.

Well, someone did, and now the price of these two Pizzas is worth well over 100 million dollars today.

Bitcoin is also decentralized; there’s no one computer that holds the ledger.

With Bitcoin, every computer that participates in the system is also keeping a copy of the ledger, also known as the Blockchain.

So if you want to take down the system or hack the ledger you’ll have to take down thousands of computers which are keeping a copy and constantly updating it.

Like most money today, Bitcoin is also digital.

This means there’s nothing physical that you can touch in Bitcoin.

There are no actual coins, there are only rows of transactions and balances.

When you “own” Bitcoin it means that you own the right to access a specific Bitcoin address record in the ledger and send funds from it to a different address.

So what does all of this mean?

Why is Bitcoin such big news?

Well for the first time since digital money came into existence we now have an alternative to the current system.

Bitcoin is a form of money that no government or bank can control.

Think about the time before the Internet, how centralized the flow of information was.

Basically if you wanted information you could get it from a few major players like the New York Times, The Washington Post and others like them.

Today, thanks to the Internet, information is decentralized and you can communicate and consume knowledge from around the world with the click of a button.

Bitcoin is the Internet of money and it’s offering a decentralized solution to money.

100

Bitcoin has several advantages over the current system.

101

First, it gives you complete control over your money.

102

With Bitcoin, you and you alone can access your funds.

103

How you actually do this will be explained in a later video.

104

No government or bank can decide to freeze your account or confiscate your holdings.

105

Bitcoin also cuts a lot of the middlemen from the process of transferring money.

106

This means that in many cases Bitcoin is cheaper to use than traditional wire transfers or money orders.

107

Also, unlike fiat currencies, Bitcoin was designed to be digital by nature, this means you can add additional layers of programming on top of it and turn it into “smart money”, but more on that in later videos.

108

Finally, Bitcoin opens up digital commerce to 2.5 billion people around the world who don’t have access to the current banking system.

109

These people are unbanked or underbanked because of where they leave and the reality that they have been born into.

110

However, today, with a mobile phone and a click of a button they can start trading using Bitcoin, no permission needed.

111

Today there are several merchants online and offline that accept Bitcoin.

112

You can order a flight or book a hotel with Bitcoin if you like.

113

There are even Bitcoin debit cards that allow you to pay at almost any store with your Bitcoin balance.

114

However the road toward acceptance by the majority of the public is still a long one.

115

As we continue in this video series, we will break down exactly how Bitcoin works and how to use it.

116

We will learn about Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin wallets, how to buy Bitcoins and much more.

117

The revolution of money began in 2009 and these days we are seeing it change money as we know it.

118

You may still have some questions.

119

If so, just leave them in the comment section below.

120

And if you're watching this video on YouTube and enjoy what you've seen, don't forget to hit the like button.

121

Then, make sure to subscribe for notifications about new episodes.

122

Thanks for joining me here at the Whiteboard.

123

For 99Bitcoins.com, I’m Nate Martin, and I’ll see you… in a bit.

✨ Vidéo recommandée

29 phrases

[Podcast 14] Love yourself first, everything will be alright! | Podcast with Anne

Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon

Cette leçon d’expression orale de niveau B2 s’appuie sur la vidéo « What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin Explained Simply ». Les mots qui reviennent le plus souvent : Bitcoin, bank, ledger, value, digital. Cette vidéo contient 123 phrases et 2204 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 12:41. Le locuteur parle à un rythme naturel d’environ 174 mots par minute, proche d’une conversation courante. 85 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais ; le reste mérite d’être vu avant de commencer.

Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo

Les 15 mots les plus avancés de la vidéo, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :

Mot	Prononciation	Sens
centralize verbe	/ˈsɛntɹəlaɪz/	centraliser
transparent adjectif	/tɹænsˈpæɹənt/	transparent
decentralize verbe	/diːˈsɛntɹəlaɪz/	décentraliser
receipt nom	/ɹɪˈsiːt/	réception
corrupt adjectif	/kəˈɹʌpt/	corrompu, dévoyé
inflate verbe	/ɪnˈfleɪt/	gonfler, se gonfler
mismanagement nom	/ˌmɪsˈmænɪd͡ʒmənt/	mauvaise gestion
redeem verbe	/ɹɪˈdiːm/	racheter
peek verbe	/piːk/	jeter un coup d'œil
sneak verbe	/sniːk/	faucher, piquer
freeze verbe	/ˈfɹiːz/	geler, glacer
wallet nom	/ˈwɑl.ət/	portefeuille, portemonnaie
coin nom	/ˈkoɪ̯n/	pièce de monnaie, jeton
banknote nom	/ˈbæŋkˌnoʊ̯t/	billet de banque, billet
confiscate verbe	/ˈkɑnfəˌskeɪt/	confisquer

Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez

Mot	Sens
take down verbe	décrocher
break down verbe	tomber en panne
figure out verbe	cerner
give away verbe	offrir, donner
open up verbe	ouvrir
walk around verbe	déambuler

La grammaire de cette vidéo

Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :

Structure	Dans la vidéo
Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le fait	is indeed · was invented · was broken
Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenant	has taken · we've changed · has changed

Prononciation à surveiller

Le locuteur utilise 23 contractions et formes réduites, comme you're, can't, don't. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.

Les sons « sh » et « zh »: notification /ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/, inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/
Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: decentralize /diːˈsɛntɹəlaɪz/, mismanagement /ˌmɪsˈmænɪd͡ʒmənt/, decentralise /diːˈsɛntɹəlaɪz/, macroeconomic /ˌmækɹoʊˌɛkəˈnɑːmɪk/, negligible /ˈnɛɡlɪd͡ʒɪbəl/

Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :

/tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: ledger /ˈlɛd͡ʒɚ/, mismanagement /ˌmɪsˈmænɪd͡ʒmənt/, negligible /ˈnɛɡlɪd͡ʒɪbəl/, merchant /ˈmɝt͡ʃənt/, scratch /skɹæt͡ʃ/
/r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: centralize /ˈsɛntɹəlaɪz/, transparent /tɹænsˈpæɹənt/, decentralize /diːˈsɛntɹəlaɪz/, receipt /ɹɪˈsiːt/, corrupt /kəˈɹʌpt/

Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo

Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
Commencez à la vitesse 0,75×, répétez phrase par phrase, puis revenez à la vitesse normale quand cela devient facile.
Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme centralize, transparent, decentralize.

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?

Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.

Technique du shadowing : lire le guide complet étape par étape →

Pratique du Shadowing: What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin Explained Simply - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

How Bitcoin Works in 5 Minutes (Technical)

This Time WAS Different

How Money Is Created and How This Makes Some Rich and Some Poor

Introduction To Marketing | Marketing 101

Concept of Electric Current with Train example | TheElectricalGuy

What is Ethereum Gas? (Examples + Easy Explanation)

I MADE $15B WITH CHAT GPT

you will never ask about pointers again after watching this video

What If Inflation Goes Negative? Deflation Explained

Raspberry Pi Explained in 100 Seconds

What does Visa do? The answer might surprise you