but, what does it all mean?

i've asked before, and i'm willing to let someone take another jab at an explanation.

i don't want to get rich without working for it, but don't want to go broke either.

Gus it means people are losing faith in Federal Reserve notes. Have you noticed China is backing the yuan with gold and Saudi Arabia is trading oil in gold ?

The crypto currencies are free from third party involvement i.e. the government

Don't ask me how they work, this Luddite hasen't a clue!

well, as a fellow Luddite we do seem to have something in common.

the whole thingy is mind-boggling in my view of currency.

and yes, china, russia & maybe others are afoot.

The people who are selling this odd money, they area accepting cash right?
Makes me thing of those selling precious metals, it it's such a good thing why don't they keep it.

Simple. Lots of money to be made selling untraceable currency to users of the dark web. Most of the people selling were early factoring miners, no capital outlay that can be turned into serious cash.

In the early days of bitcoin you could mine the primes using an enthusiast class desktop. Factoring was easy, so most people in the know already had the equipment. Now, so many primes have been factored, that you need to run a farm of multi-gpu specialty boxes to get a hit.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have value because people place value in a currency that is completely untraceable. The ultimate open source fiat currency.

That and the quantity must be "mined" with computer calculations which gives it something in common with other commodities without the environmental damage. Dollars are being printed with abandon.

That makes some sense. I have a client who invests in 'computing power' to resell later at a profit. It sounds like folks are investing in the capacity to factor in the hopes it will become more valuable. He tried explaining it to me but I don't really get it. I don't invest in something I don't understand so I'm out of it.

People may believe it is untraceable but when used for pay there is a hard record. I just watched a Nightly Business Report segment that included an interview with a Duke University professor. He said it would be the LAST form of currency a bad guy should want to use, but people have their own impressions of how it works.

If I don't understand it I don't invest $$ in it.

It's only traceable if you do a "public" transaction. If you want to meet face-to-face with someone somehow, and exchange actual pieces of the computer code algorithm, it can never be traced (similar to a "cash" transaction).

To invest in cryptocurrency, you don't need to understand how it is created/mined/networked. At this point, you can simply convert some of your dollars into cryptos on an exchange that is setup for that purpose. You can buy an entire single chain of Bitcoin right now for somewhere between $3000 to $5000 dollars. Similar to buying gold on an exchange, you can either have them hold onto the computer code in your name, or you can get ahold of the actual code itself and hide it under your mattress. Once you have the "chain" of code, no one else can ever have it unless you give it out to them.

some blurp out there on the 'net that russia is going to have the first gov't sanctioned or authorized cryptocurrency. something about helping trade. it appears to be complicated.

How many dollars are actually being printed? Since most of our money is just computer records, are they actually printing it or just saying it now exists in a computer?