My first contact with Bitcoin happened somewhere on the second half of year 2011 after first bubble had already burst. I was fascinated by its financial properties but digging deeper I found the real beauty of Bitcoin - how cryptographic primitives are combined to create a financial system where no central authority has to be trusted. Although I immediately saw potential for decentralized crypto-currencies I did not foresee such fast growth and quick gains for early adopters of Bitcoin. Monetary value and EUR/USD price of Bitcoin are indeed topics I would like to discuss but acknowledging the fact that any kind of predictions and evaluations are at this point just a little shy of being pointless I might stick to technical explorations. I encourage people to look at Bitcoin as revolutionary experiment in the world of finance - one that may pave a path to bigger changes in our societies economic behavior and therefore refactor social systems as a whole. If you do have any interest in Bitcoin please do yourself a favor and try to understand the basics of technologies the system is built on.

During studies in Tallinn University of Technology and Tartu University joint program in Cyber Security I used Bitcoin as a topic in several assignments including my Master's thesis titled Bitcoin Security. The paper introduces how such a complex and ambitiously promising system can be secured against hacking attempts that any system of significant value faces. It walks readers through most important concepts of Bitcoin and their ingenious combination to build a safe web of mitigations for threats and ensures that properties that may seem as weaknesses at first glance are actually part of clever bigger picture design. Since defending the paper in summer 2012 much has changed in Bitcoins ecosystem and services built on top of it have become way more professional. At the same time the strong security discussed in the paper has remained constant for Bitcoin itself.

Another earlier paper I wrote analyzes Bitcoin by fitting its properties into a model called Financial Cryptography in 7 Layers by Ian Grigg. This framework was created a decade before Bitcoin to measure possible success of financial crypto-systems. Read Bitcoin in 7 Layers and peak at a Prezi for this paper.

All your thoughts and questions are welcome in the comments.