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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-up-with-current-currency dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow0245

Cryptocurrencies have found a ton of admirers recently, but guess who isn't loving them right now — Dutch high school students.

This year's VWO examination – a matriculation test high school students are required to take to be eligible to pursue university education in the Netherlands – featured an unorthodox theme: Bitcoin.

The students were provided a description for Bitcoin and how the cryptocurrency is mined:

Bitcoin is a digital currency that only exists online. It exists since January 1, 2009 and can be used to pay at online stores or for other online services. Bitcoin is not issued by a central bank, unlike normal money. Instead, Bitcoin is created by letting computers work on solutions for selected mathematical problems.

It works like this: anyone can run special software on his or her computer to contribute to solving such a mathematical problem. The owner of the computer that finds the solution to a problem receives 25 BTC (newly mined) as a reward. Because in 2014, such a problem was solved every 10 minutes, 25 BTC were put into circulation every 10 minutes.

Based on the paragraph, the students were asked to answer five questions, which were all about mathematical problems but developed on the provided description of Bitcoin.

The questions asked were relevant to the real world Bitcoin, including calculating the year by which the reward for miners will be lower than one Bitcoin and determining the maximum amount of Bitcoins that can ever be in circulation.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/05/15/dutch-high-school-exam-bitcoin/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:36PM (#680389)

    Data, such as private keys, can be written in stone pebbles and handed around without any computing networks or even computers.

    Hell, transactions can be constructed offline (even by hand, frankly), and then handed about in the same way, and then published to the Bitcoin Network at some other time in the future.