Abacus | After China’s crackdown, the UN’s green energy drive could take Hong Kong’s Bitcoin miners to the cleaners

I fell out with a friend in Hong Kong some eight or so years ago over “investing” in Bitcoin. I said it was a dumb thing to do. She maintained it was the future of all currency transactions and that I was the idiot. It spiralled down. I have no idea how it turned out for her, as she unfriended me on LinkedIn, blocked my mobile phone number and we haven’t spoken since.

I admit, though, that I reacted on instinct. It took me a long time to get my head around cryptocurrencies, blockchains, coins, tokens and other terminology, and how it all works together.

When someone said “distributed ledger” my brain would freeze up. I understood the security aspect of it: you can’t cook the books several thousand times over, but I didn’t realise then that the mass adaptation of the technology depended on a substantial increase in available computing power attached to the internet. So I tucked it away for future use.

The idea of cryptocurrencies that sit on top of blockchains took a bit longer to land, but when I witnessed the Japanese madly trading on their smartphones on the Tokyo subway soon after China introduced a ban on cryptos, I got it: it was a substitute for gambling.

Restrictions on gambling in Japan are extremely tight, and with limited access to gambling establishments for the public, cryptocurrency trading on smartphones was the equivalent of a bookie in the palm of your hand. And it was fun, like playing Candy Crush.