It's early 2009. You're on your old Mac desktop. You know… the one with the big white keys that click loudly when you type? On one of the anonymous discussion forums you follow, you see someone has posted a link to a whitepaper — "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." You read it, find it interesting, but brush it off. Little do you know, you're about to witness the start of a technological revolution.
Since the release of Bitcoin's whitepaper, 29 million different cryptocurrencies have been created, including Ethereum and Dogecoin. Though the cryptocurrency industry has only been around for about 30 years, it's left its mark on the technological space. Scams and scandals have shaken the crypto world, and what was once a niche alternative investment has now captured the minds of many young investors. But what, exactly, is the value in this new-age digital currency?
Cryptocurrency, for dummies
Gail-Joon Ahn is a professor specializing in computer science and engineering at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. He is also the founding director of the Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations and the Security Engineering for Future Computing Laboratory. Ahn has extensive experience researching blockchain technology in relation to cybersecurity.
Think about your MyASU account, for example. Every account is connected to a centralized server that stores the information located within the accounts. So, in order for you to use your MyASU account from your laptop, you have to tap into this centralized network belonging to ASU. Blockchain works differently. Rather than tapping every account into a centralized server, each individual account is part of a blockchain that acts as its own server. So, in other words, everyone's computer or phone can be its own centralized system that makes up one small piece of the puzzle.
Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, utilize this blockchain technology. You can think of crypto as digital cash. When you use your debit card at a store, the retailer, your bank and the third party that processed the transaction have it all on record. However, if you pay in cash, there isn't the same "paper trail" left behind. Therefore, crypto is pseudonymous because it doesn't need a third party, acting as a centralized system, to process transactions. At the end of the day, there is always a way for your transactions to be traced back to you, unless you take extra measures to conceal your online identity.
"Back in the '90s, people were thinking, 'Can you use a mathematical format as cash?'" Ahn said. Bitcoin brought this idea to life. A mathematical encryption essentially means a message is created and hidden behind a mathematical problem, which acts as a key. In order for you to unlock this key, you need to solve the equation. This is how "mining" Bitcoin works. You, or a group of data servers, must work together to solve math equations to collect the Bitcoin locked behind them.
The U.S. dollar is a fiat currency, which means that it holds a value because we have decided it does. When you hold a $20 bill, you are technically holding a piece of paper, but the government guarantees that this paper is worth something — it's currency. Bitcoin holds its value because of how limited it is due to the mining process.
"Once you solve the problem, you will get the coin," Ahn said. "Whenever you keep generating this coin, eventually you're getting harder to solve problems. So that's why you have a limited number of coins."
Young investors
"I feel like the idea I had when I got into crypto was 'I'm going to become 'fuck you' rich in three months,'" Haidar Alasaif, a junior mechanical engineering systems student from Saudi Arabia, said. "I don't know if you'd call it ambitious or delusional."
He became interested in cryptocurrency when he was 15 years old. During the crypto boom in 2020, he began day trading cryptocurrencies with his older brother. Their strategy involved buying as soon as the market opened at 9 a.m. and selling at "peak hours" between noon and 3 p.m.
They saw an increase of 3 to 4% on their penny stocks, which are stakes in small companies that trade for less than $5. Often thought to be "low risk" due to their low price, some young investors find them enticing. Alasaif noted that his day trading was very time-intensive, making it unsustainable in the long term.
During the peak of his trading, Alasaif lived in Saudi Arabia, where the crypto industry was highly regulated. "What you had to do if you wanted to trade crypto in Saudi Arabia is have an international bank account in your name because you could not sell crypto and keep the capital gains in your Saudi Arabian bank account," he said.
Today, regulations in the country have changed, and investors can place their capital gains directly into their Saudi bank accounts.
Where do you begin?
Unlike traditional investments such as stocks, bonds, real estate or commodities, the crypto community is smaller and elusive.
Alasaif utilized various social media apps to learn about different cryptocurrencies and how he could go about investing. "We had this Discord group. It was $15 to get into the group, but they'd give you tips on what stocks (were) going to bloom that day," he said.
With traditional investments, many people read financial journals like the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal, look at companies' financial statements on the Securities and Exchange Commission or consult a wealth advisor to build an investment strategy. However, when it comes to cryptocurrency, especially smaller and newer ones, it's not as easy to find public information. Penny stocks are not listed in major stock exchanges such as the NASDAQ, meaning they don't have to go through a rigorous vetting process to be sold publicly. Due to this lack of transparency and available information, investors consult forums like Reddit and Discord for investing advice.
"I feel like Reddit and Discord are where, quote on quote, 'geeks' are and they know their stuff. They're the ones I feel like, put in the research and then there's a reason why you pay money to get into these group chats because that's how they make their money as well," Alasaif said. He even compares the group moderators to "stockbrokers" in the crypto world.
Alasaif also believes the crypto community utilizes social media more than other investors because they tend to be younger in age.
Matthew Jurenka is a graduate student pursuing his master's degree in computer science. Jurenka has been working with blockchain technology since he was an undergrad. One of his projects utilized blockchain technology without a relation to cryptocurrency. The project involved prepaid phone data that often goes to waste. If you buy a prepaid SIM card with 10 gigabytes of data on it, you likely won't use all 10.
"The other 5 are just gonna go to waste, right? So the idea is with blockchain, you're able to use the amount that you need and take the amount that you don't actually use and then sell it back to the market," Jurenka said.
While Jurenka is not heavily interested in the investment side of cryptocurrency, his extensive experience with the engineering aspect has given him an in-depth insight into the industry. He believes that the overvaluation of crypto stocks happens quite often because the industry revolves around "hype." This, combined with the illusions many young people have that they can "beat the market," can lead to large financial losses.
"It's a lot of the marketing behind it. If you look at Robinhood, if you look at the marketing, they try to encourage you, they try to make you think that you're smarter," Jurenka said.
He believes that stock exchanges want people to make as many trades as possible because they can make money on the fees. "They just want people to make trades. They want as much money going through the system as possible. And so, they kind of feed into this narrative that, 'You're smarter than everybody else,'" he said.
Not so above board
Alasaif said there are so many scams in the crypto world because regulations have not yet caught up to the industry's growth. It's difficult to form a fake company, go public on the stock market and sell shares without being busted along the way due to intense regulations.
Crypto, on the other hand, hasn't yet been regulated the way traditional investments have. For example, pump and dump schemes have become prevalent in the crypto world. Since many small cryptocurrencies trade over-the-counter, meaning they are not listed on a major stock exchange, they are not vetted by any financial institutions. As a result, investors don't have a lot to judge the company by other than "hype."
Fraudulent companies can then inflate the price of their crypto company by creating fake hype using social media. If enough investors purchase the stocks — leading to an inflated price — the fraudulent investors sell off their stock, pocket the cash and watch as the value crashes.
Another problematic occurrence in the crypto world is companies that don't actually have a product. Take, for example, OneCoin — a fraudulent company founded by Ruja Ignatova, a con artist who has been missing since 2019. Ignatova told investors that investing in OneCoin was their chance to get rich and break into crypto while they still could. After raising billions of dollars and disappearing, it became apparent that OneCoin was a fake company, with zero technological backing.
"Don't trust everything you see on the face, always look deeper," Alasaif said.
Ahn said there are many cryptocurrency scams that involve the sale of stocks for a company without any real blockchain technology. "There is no guarantee that those coins are really leveraging the blockchain technology," he said.
He also explained that researchers can do trustworthiness tests to determine how legitimate a cryptocurrency is. With most cryptocurrencies, the blockchain should have some of its solutions as open source. Open source allows the users to be sure that the coin they are investing in is actually using blockchain. It also allows you to understand the mining process and verify its legitimacy. Think of this as open source AI, which allows us to understand that we are using a real LLM chatbot and not just typing to a human on the other side.
"If you're familiar with blockchain, you can easily identify it (scams) because 'Oh it seems they are not using a well-known blockchain open source library' then you can easily say 'Oh there's some red flags,'" Ahn said.
So if researchers can identify a fraudulent cryptocurrency, how did OneCoin get away with its scam for so long? Ahn said that even if a website claims to use well-known blockchain algorithms, it still isn't easy for the average person to verify the claims.
"These are my booting algorithms, these are my mining algorithms, but eventually you don't know exactly whether or not they are leveraging these algorithms in their real implementation," he said. Researchers would eventually figure out that the coin is fraudulent because of the different tests they can run, but the average investor has a harder time doing so.
Thinking beyond crypto
Dragan Boscovic is a clinical professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business. He is also the director of the Blockchain Research Lab at ASU where he conducts research on blockchain technology outside of just cryptocurrency.
Boscovic said there are three main features of blockchain technology: a unique identity, verifiable ownership and the ability to record every transaction in an immutable way.
"And on top of that, you can add that everything is auditable (in) real time, because everything is on blockchain," he said. "If you make those records public, then anyone, anytime, anywhere, can audit what was done."
The blockchain technology backing cryptocurrency represents something far larger than just penny stocks and scandals that have shaken the industry. It represents a revolutionary technology that has the potential to create new industries and systems.
"Students are very much into cryptocurrency, I think they see that as liberating in some sense," he said.
Edited by Leah Mesquita, Natalia Jarrett and Abigail Wilt. This story is part of The Culture Issue, which was released on March 25, 2026. See the entire publication here.
Reach the reporter at jbanihan@asu.edu
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Jude is a junior studying finance. This is her second semester with The State Press.
