The Learning Network Blog: Bitcoin Fever: Using Digital Currency to Understand the Nature of Money

Overview | What are bitcoins, and why are individuals purchasing them? What tends to make currency useful?

In this lesson, students discover the fundamental qualities of currency by reading through and studying about the bitcoin, the experimental and upstart digital commodity that has grabbed the attention of speculators, traders, bankers and regulators close to the planet.

Supplies | Computer systems with Internet entry

Warm-Up | Inquire college students to watch the over video about the bitcoin asking the query: What helps make income — funds? Then have students talk about the video, and their knowing of how income works. If you have extra time, college students can perform in little groups to invent a new currency. Groups ought to take into account: What would your currency appear like? How would they acquire it? What would they use it for? And how may possibly it achieve, or drop, value? Then groups can share just before the class reads the relevant report.

Associated | In his Op-Ed article “Much Ado About Bitcoin,” Adrian Chen, a journalist who aided bring the bitcoin mainstream consideration, describes the standard premises of the digital currency:

Bitcoin is created on a weird combine of the most outdated-fashioned kind of speculative greed, bolstered by a contemporary utopian cyberlibertarian ideology. Boosters say that the bitcoin is the currency of the long term. I’d argue that the phenomenon is a digital gold rush flawlessly emblematic of the current.

Some of the bitcoin’s appeal comes from the reality that it does not physically exist. Each bitcoin is just a string of numbers. As an alternative of a financial institution, a decentralized network of computer systems guarantees the authenticity of the bitcoin and issues new ones by doing complex calculations. This permits the bitcoin to be traded peer to peer, bypassing credit card companies and payment processors. It is digital cash, giving the very same relative anonymity and freedom as a paper sack of expenses.

Background Vocabulary | Read through the total write-up with your class, then response the queries beneath.

Inquiries | For discussion and reading through comprehension:

1. What is the bitcoin, and who developed it?


2. How did the writer come to find out about the bitcoin?


3. How much has the worth of a bitcoin altered considering that the writer 1st learned of the currency?


4. According to the author, who makes use of the bitcoin?


5. What are some of the motives folks would want to buy bitcoins?


6. Does the writer think the bitcoin has a viable future? Why or why not?


7. What do you think will occur with the bitcoin going forward? Will it be effective as a new currency? Why?

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Action | Have students investigate the fundamental qualities of currency by studying and researching about the bitcoin. Start with this short background of the bitcoin so that college students can familiarize themselves with the currency’s origins and emergence into mainstream use. Then have groups of students select some of the following facets of the bitcoin to study and existing on.

one. How is the bitcoin being utilised as a currency, and by whom?

A single function of currency is to facilitate the exchange of items and providers. In order for that to happen, people have to be willing to accept the currency for those items and companies. So, who accepts the bitcoin as payment? Rides on Virgin Galactic’s commercial spaceflights and black industry offers may not be for everyone, but here’s somebody who purchased all their Christmas presents with the bitcoin.

And who is purchasing the bitcoin? Study this post about how the bitcoin is catching on with speculators in China, and see a true-time map of how bitcoins are circulating around there world.

two. What value does the bitcoin have, and exactly where does it get its value?

Bitcoin’s F.A.Q. webpage explains why the currency has worth:

Associated Assets

From The Finding out Network

From NYTimes.com

About the Net

Bitcoins have worth because they are valuable as a kind of funds. Bitcoin has the characteristics of income (sturdiness, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability) based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies). In quick, the bitcoin is backed by mathematics. With these attributes, all that is essential for a form of income to hold worth is trust and adoption.

But a currency has limited value unless it is officially recognized by nations and institutions. Who recognizes the bitcoin as a respectable payment approach? Read about what federal officials in the United States think about the bitcoin. And although China’s Central Financial institution at first signaled approval for the digital currency, current developments propose they may have altered their thoughts.

Ideally, the value of a currency must be steady and predictable. So, how significantly is a bitcoin really worth? You can track the worth of a bitcoin in United States bucks or in other globe currencies.

three. How are bitcoins created, and how are they stored safe?

Most currencies have the residence that new income can just be printed, but where do the new bitcoins come from? They are “mined,” which has grow to be a aggressive business chance for participants. Paul Krugman describes this method of mining as “a drastic retrogression” that is as fundamentally foolish as relying on gold and silver was a century in the past.

When somebody “mines” a new bitcoin, what is its value? Use the existing value of a bitcoin or the complete value of all the bitcoins in circulation to locate out.

Although the new bitcoins can be “mined,” the greatest quantity of bitcoins that can ever be issued is 21 million and the price at which new bitcoins are issued automatically slows in excess of time.

Another critical characteristic of currency is that its safety is guaranteed. Who ensures the safety of the bitcoin? Who watches in excess of all of the transactions? Read up on how the bitcoin works, and how protection in the technique is managed. Then read through about latest episodes of fraud involving the bitcoin, and the limits of present regulations to crack down on digital currency theft.

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Going Further

Will the bitcoin be successful as a currency?

Neil Irwin writes in The Washington Post that the bitcoin is beneficial for educating a lesson about why income has value, but that it will not function as an important option monetary system. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman agrees that the bitcoin’s reliance on a fixed cash supply may possibly make it a good investment, but not a wholesome currency. It leads to speculating and hoarding, which damages its usefulness as a currency. Go through the above content articles about these prospective fundamental flaws in the bitcoin’s design and style, and choose no matter whether you feel the bitcoin will succeed?

What other digital currencies are on the market?

Bitcoin is not the only digital currency on the market. Study about the competitors amongst currencies in this DealBook report, and verify out the values of various virtual currencies. Do you believe a diverse digital currency style, 1 that doesn’t depend on a fixed income provide, may in the end be far more effective than the bitcoin in the extended phrase? Or, is it the finite provide of bitcoins that actually tends to make the currency so attractive to investors?

Requirements

This resource could be used to handle the academic standards listed beneath.

View all

McREL Standards and Sources

Economics

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  two Understands characteristics of distinct economic techniques, financial institutions, and economic incentives.
  


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  four Understands simple features of market place structures and exchanges.
  


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  eight Understands basic ideas of United States fiscal policy and monetary policy.
  

The Learning Network Blog: Bitcoin Fever: Using Digital Currency to Understand the Nature of Money

Police accused of using excessive force at student protests

Website link to video: Police ‘try to hit students with batons’ at protest

Students were involved in a series of angry confrontations with the police in central London on Thursday as allegations circulated that officers had used unacceptable levels of force to break up campus protests more than the previous few weeks.

Video footage obtained by the Guardian appeared to present one officer striking a hooded protester in the encounter right after college students occupied portion of the University of London Senate Home headquarters on Wednesday.

On Thursday about 200 college students held a “Cops off campus” rally outdoors the University of London Union creating, which led to more violent confrontations with scores of officers that spread to surrounding streets. A Metropolitan police spokesman mentioned there had been 36 arrests.

Michael Chessum, president of the University of London Union, explained: “The level of police force that we have noticed in the final couple of days is absolutely unprecedented on university campuses. It seems pre-planned. It is as if they are reacting to a riot situation – taking the degree of force – and utilizing it towards college students protesting on a university campus.”

On Wednesday, demonstrators had occupied element of the University of London Senate House headquarters. Police and the university’s private security staff broke up the demonstration and five protesters had been arrested, with one particular held on suspicion of assaulting an officer.

College students claimed the police and personal safety staff had been unnecessarily violent and accused officers of assaulting them. Video footage seen by the Guardian appeared to show one particular officer striking a hooded protester in the encounter. In the footage, the demonstrator – who gave his identify as Tee Jay – fell to the ground and the crowd was pushed back.

Jay, 24, from Hackney, north-east London, explained: “Nothing was mentioned. The police have been attempting to clear the crowd of individuals. I turned my back to [the police officer] to variety of walk away, he pushed, I kind of turned round to see who it was – ‘Why are you pushing me?’

“The punch came and I went straight to the floor, then I acquired up and left.” The University of West London media production student said he was component of the group that occupied an region of Senate Home.

Another protester, Helen Singh, a philosophy pupil, claimed she was pushed over by officers, who were “punching men and women indiscriminately”. “We had been walking away from the protest. I was pushed to the ground and my glasses smashed into three pieces,” she stated.

A police spokesman mentioned: “We have acquired no complaints in relation to police action at Wednesday’s protest.”

On Thursday, at a demonstration against police techniques, which had been organised before Wednesday’s incident, about 200 demonstrators marched from the pupil union to Senate Home.

When demonstrators arrived, there have been skirmishes with police, who have been previously within the premises. Several much more police vans arrived and more than the subsequent two hrs there have been a series of clashes among small groups of protesters and police in the surrounding streets. College students again claimed the police had been hefty-handed.

Chessum mentioned he believed the “unprecedented response” by the authorities was component of an try to cease the student protest motion gaining momentum.

“They know from 2010 [when there have been large-scale pupil protests in London and close to the country] that this kind of heavy-handed policing puts individuals off, and I think this is what they are making an attempt to do this time.”

Police accused of using excessive force at student protests

Using a pen helps us discover thought – but the writing"s on the wall | Andrew Brown

‘There’s no contact for handwriting in most jobs these days, any much more than there is any requirement for independent thought’ … Andrew Brown’s scrawl. Photograph: Andrew Brown

Swedish schools are thinking about no matter whether to abandon the educating of handwriting. They will continue to educate block capitals, but the subtleties of cursive writing will no longer be transmitted outside the elite. This would seem to me to lose a single of the most wonderful cognitive tools ever invented. Handwriting helps you feel. The physicality of it helps make the connected psychological processes clearer and more memorable.

This type of argument is quite wasted on educational bureaucrats, for whom the question is regardless of whether children can learn to variety more rapidly and a lot more clearly than they can write by hand. Right after all, there is no phone for handwriting in most jobs nowadays, any a lot more than there is any necessity for independent imagined.

I never consider there is any doubt that a educated typist can type faster and much more legibly than it is achievable to compose in longhand. Nor have I ever identified any type of handwriting program that lets me talk rapidly and accurately with a personal computer. The nearest point would be the phone keyboards that let you slide a finger about them as an alternative of striking individual letters. In any case, they lack all distinctiveness. That is an asset if you are feeding into machines. But the stage of handwriting is not to communicate with machines. In some sense it’s not even a implies of communication with other men and women. It is useful simply because it distances us from machines, and helps make our output the two far more precise and less predictable.

There is so a lot much more encoded in a handwritten page than in something typewritten. The archives of metadata that Google or the NSA can collect about our words can not match the variety and depth of associations that my handwriting reveals to me. It might not be obvious to any individual else, but the purpose of personal imagined is not quickly to be shared.

Handwriting is the expression of all people facets of character that are not able to be shared or even glimpsed on Facebook. Handwriting is what I turn to when I want to learn imagined – the pen, like a divining rod, moves in my hand in the direction of anything I can only come to feel and not however see.

This is partly since it is so much more complex an action than typing. That looks like a disadvantage, but we are bodily, embodied creatures, and need to use muscle tissues when we think appropriately. Just as strolling is much greater than sitting nevertheless if you want to perform out a challenging issue, so does the varied co-ordination necessary to write cursively drive considered more efficiently than just moving fingers up and down on to the keys.

It also captures the disconnected and chaotic methods in which real imagined emerges. A handwritten webpage can have loops, insertions, deletions and marginalia in approaches that pc application really finds difficult to emulate. It operates against the false simplistic certainties of PowerPoint and for that explanation alone is a ability that all democracies must teach.

My own handwriting is minor utilised now. I even now maintain a pen and pad of paper on the creating desk for when I get caught and have to come to feel my way via a hard passage. And only a hand-scrawled web page or 3 of A4 can capture the glorious and nearly dreaming exuberance of believed that often anticipates the day’s initial cup of coffee. But I am the only person who ever reads or tries to go through what I compose that way. Handwriting as a mode of communication with other people is practically dead.

My father had a firm, clear hand. He belonged to a generation in which all important selections had been conveyed in handwriting, and typing was a specialised manual skill, so he essential to be read by other folks. I once discovered his notes on a Foreign Office document in the Public Data Workplace in Kew, and the firm neat downstrokes had hardly altered at all from people of the letters he wrote to me forty many years later on. I see them in my very own hand now: the marks of a Belfast protestant temperament, even though the loops and swinging trails are all my very own.

Using a pen helps us discover thought – but the writing"s on the wall | Andrew Brown

My best English lesson: using rugby to engage boys in descriptive writing

English teacher, Matt James, tackles descriptive creating by transforming his classroom into a rugby stadium. Photograph: Russell Boyce/REUTERS

When I was eight years previous my father took me to Wales’ residence stadium, then affectionately known as the Arms Park. To this day, I bear in mind it vividly. I can recall the sounds, the sights, even the smells. Years later on I located myself trying to engage a class in descriptive writing with a distinct concentrate on Cwricwlwm Cymreig – the notion of Wales and Welsh.

It was also about this level that my headteacher known as me into his workplace and asked me to get the college lead on the nationwide classroom conundrum – countering boys’ underachievement.

Initial failure

Remembering my first time at a stadium, I decided to arm myself with both conundrums – Wales and boys’ wants – and ask my class to record, in a table of the senses, factors they would locate at the Millennium Stadium (or one more stadium of their decision).

To my shock, very couple of of my students had produced the pilgrimage to the residence of Welsh rugby or, certainly, any stadium. My naivety had blinkered me to the socio-economic challenges of the regional setting. Following a hastily rearranged lesson, I went home and believed about achievable alternatives.

The new strategy

At such quick observe I could not consider a whole class to the stadium, let alone to see a game, so I made the decision to deliver the stadium to the classroom.

I told my pupils that in their next lesson we would describe the Millennium Stadium and that the classroom was going to turn out to be the rugby arena. I invited them to deliver their Welsh rugby tops and they were permitted (just this after) to deliver snacks and drinks.

The focus was nonetheless going to be descriptive creating and they were still going to be considering about the stadium utilizing their five senses. I just needed them to get a genuine truly feel for what it would be like to be there and to knowledge what they have been getting asked to write about. If there was no experiential understanding, I may as properly have asked them to describe the scene at midnight on the moon.

Seeing it in action

Prior to their arrival at the following lesson I organised my area so that all desks had been at the back and the chairs formed two horseshoes, the two facing the interactive whiteboard. As the class entered the room the speakers blared “Bread of Heaven” and”Guys of Harlech” – two anthems strongly connected with Welsh rugby – and the pupils were informed that all they would need to have is their table of senses from the earlier (failed) lesson and a pen.

I invited them to fill out the table now as they sat in their seats viewing the interactive board enjoying one particular of my a lot of rugby DVDs. This 1, incidentally, showed extended highlights of Wales’ victory over England in 2008.

I was astonished at the engagement of the class. This wasn’t the true stadium but, with their tops on, food and drink at the ready, and the volume turned up to the optimum, they did start to get a real sense of place.

Post match

At the end of the match, which brought with it several loud cheers, I informed the pupils that they now had to go to the “press area” at the back of the class. They carried their seats to the desks and started writing up their findings.

I was delighted to read some exciting creating from some previously disengaged boys. A single had even commented on the “boy sitting behind me who could not sit still and tipped crisps on my seat”. One more, with no currently being asked, began making similes this kind of as, “the players played like dragons” and “the crowd roared like a lion”.

I was delighted. The pupils from this initial lesson have considering that left the school armed with their GCSEs but I still remember their yr eight excitement as they left the classroom, discussing the match as if they had been there.

Self evaluation

I am constantly updating this lesson. 1 situation I typically have with it is asking pupils to disregard the match commentary. Most discover this an simple task, but reduce-ability pupils at times fall into the trap of describing what they hear the commentator saying. Some thing that I am also usually mindful of is that not all boys are interested in sport. For this reason, sometimes the lesson is turned into “describe a theme park” and YouTube video clips of rollercoasters are utilized. The possibilities, even though not countless, are several.

When I up coming do this lesson, I’m going to put together match day tickets before to the lesson so that pupils have to go to allocated seats and perhaps encounter the shuffle down the row as other individuals have to stand or swing their knees to a single side. Now, each and every time I go to watch a game I’m constantly considering about how to deliver certain aspects of it to my classroom. I think it’d be a bit too far to deliver hotdogs and burgers to lesson though.

Matt James is a 12 months 7 progress co-ordinator and English teacher at Risca Local community Extensive College. You can follow him on Twitter @RCCS_MrJames and though his website right here.

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My best English lesson: using rugby to engage boys in descriptive writing

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