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ROME — Forget all those loud calls to eat less meat and more plants for better health and a stronger planet — new research shows the world is not producing nearly enough fruit and vegetables to feed everyone.

Canadian researchers compared global agricultural production with the sort of diet backed by nutritionists — and favoured by environmentalists — and said they found a “fundamental mismatch” between what is being produced and what the world’s population would actually need.

“We simply can’t all adopt a healthy diet under the current global agriculture system,” the study’s co-author Evan Fraser said in a statement. 

“Results show that the global system currently overproduces grains, fats and sugars,” added Fraser, director of Arrell Food Institute at University of Guelph in Ontario.

But it is short of fruit and veg, he said. 

Recent research has urged consumers to eat less meat as a way of feeding the world’s growing population without causing irreparable damage to the environment. 

Livestock are responsible for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, and scientists say eating less meat could help.

The world risks sweltering heatwaves, extreme rainfall and shrinking harvests unless unprecedented efforts are made to keep temperature rise to 1.5ºC, according to the United Nations.

Small servings

The Canadian study, published this week in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, calculated how much food was being grown compared to what is recommended by the Harvard University’s “Healthy Eating Plate” guide.

The guide recommends fruits and vegetables should form half of any diet, whole grains 25 per cent and protein, fat and dairy make up the rest. 

It broke down food groups into portions and found the world currently produces 12 servings of grains per person instead of the recommended eight; five servings of fruits and vegetables instead of 15; and four servings of sugar instead of none.

If neither diet nor farming practices change, the world would need 12 million more hectares of arable land and some 1.3 billion more hectares of pasture land by 2050 to feed a projected population of 9.8 billion, the study added.

Lawrence Hadad, executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, said fruits and vegetables were becoming more expensive due to thin demand, low productivity and high losses in storage and transport.

“To change this dynamic, fruits and vegetable consumption would have to be given a high priority by governments in nutrition and health plans,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Governments worldwide have promoted a range of healthy-eating policies, urging increasingly obese populations to replace sugary and starchy processed food with more fruit and vegetables to increase longevity and improve overall health.

Fruits and vegetables are central to combating all forms of malnutrition but nearly all of agriculture research and development is focused on cereals, added Hadad, co-winner of this year’s World Food Prize, founded in 1986 by Nobel laureate Norman Bourlag and dubbed the Nobel for agriculture. 

Relationships and Couples Therapist

Do you feel you overreact to certain people or situations? Do you get anxious, defensive or angry? “Taking things personally” is when we interpret other people’s actions and words as comments about us.

Imagine a person you know feeling bad about something and starting to blame you for causing those feelings in them. Does it trigger feelings of guilt or defensiveness in you? This is taking it personally — taking on the other person’s problem and shame as your own, thus allowing someone else to control your peace of mind and your self-esteem. 

What are your triggers?

Triggers are emotional reactions to “old emotional wounds” from our past that were not processed and allowed to heal properly. A person’s comment, behaviour or body language can trigger old wounds and set off an emotional intensity similar to the one experienced in the past.

We know we have been triggered when we overact to someone’s comment or behaviour (or lack of), when our reaction is over the top and disproportionate to a comment or behaviour of another person. Each person reacts differently to certain events and situations, depending on each person’s unique personality and history; what triggers your partner or friend does not necessarily trigger you and vice versa. 

Owning your reactions

Accept responsibility for how you react instead of falling into the role of the victim. Identifying what triggered you, instead of putting all the blame on the person or circumstances around you, will prevent you from feeling powerless and more in control of your life.

Recognising as soon as you get triggered

Before you are aware that you are experiencing an emotional reaction, you will feel it in your body as a sensation: your heart rate and breathing can change, muscle can tense up, you may feel tightness in your stomach. So stop for a moment and try to pinpoint those bodily sensations as soon as you feel them, and then try to identify and name the accompanying emotion. This might be difficult to identify at the beginning but the more you practice, the better you become. You can read a book about emotions or engage the help of a therapist.

Identifying what triggered your emotion

Instead of reacting, try to identify the reason why you are feeling this way. Maybe you are feeling angry because someone crossed your boundaries in the present but the pain was also compounded because your boundaries were often crossed in the past. Do not judge or fear your emotions but try to listen to them and accept them; they are messages from your body to inform you that you need to protect yourself or take some kind of action. Anger, for instance, serves a function in trying to tell you that someone violated your boundaries and you need to take care of yourself by resetting them, such as assertively asking for what you need or by drawing limits of some kind. 

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

TAMPA — Humpback whales are famous for their eerie, underwater songs. But researchers in Japan said on Wednesday these massive marine creatures stop singing, at least temporarily, when human-driven ships are nearby.

Researchers focused on the remote Ogasawara Islands in Japan, some 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo, where a single passenger-cargo liner passed through the area once per day.

Male humpback whales sing as a way to communicate and attract mates.

But by plunging a pair of hydrophones into the water to listen to the whales’ reaction — about 26 of whom were detected in the study area — researchers found that the approach of a ship silenced them.

“The main reaction of humpback whales was to stop singing either when the ship approached or after it passed by,” said the study in the journal PLOS ONE, led by Koki Tsujii from Ogasawara Whale Watching Association and Hokkaido University.

Fewer male humpbacks sang in the area within 500 metres of the shipping lane than elsewhere. 

“After the ship passed by, whales within around 1,200 metres tended to temporarily reduce singing or stop singing altogether,” said the study.

Many whales did not start to sing again until a half hour after the ship was gone from the area.

Since ocean noise has been on the rise in recent decades, some experts said the findings raise new questions about what other whale behaviours might be changing due to mounting human presence on the high seas. 

Linda Weilgart, a researcher at Dalhousie University who was not involved in the study, called the whales’ responses “remarkable”, particularly since the single ship’s noise was not very loud.

“As the authors note, however, ongoing studies are required to determine if indeed the response was temporary, as factors such as stress levels need to be considered and examined,” she added. 

“Also, it is unknown what such modifications in singing behaviour, a vital reproductive behaviour, have on their reproductive success.”

Only male humpback whales sing, so the research did not delve into the effects of shipping noise on females and calves. 

Nicolas Entrup, policy expert at OceanCare, a Swiss-based wildlife advocacy group, said the impacts on whales appear to be “quite significant given the fact that it addresses the impact of a vessel crossing an important whale habitat just once a day.

“In some regions, shipping lanes exposed to dozens of container ships crossing such habitat create significant impacts which may go far beyond a change in the vocalisation behaviour. Therefore, this piece of research adds another piece to the puzzle of a blue planet that has become far too loud for whales,” he said.

A smoke alarm that broadcasts a mother’s voice would wake children much more quickly than alarms that blast high-pitched tones, a new US study finds. 

Sleeping children, as it turns out, are fairly impervious to the screeching of a smoke alarm. Researchers found that most children ages five through eight took more than five minutes to wake up with a standard alarm, as compared with around four seconds when they heard the sound of their mother’s voice, according to the results published in The Journal of Paediatrics. 

“The thing that was most remarkable to us was to see a child sleep five minutes through a very loud high-pitched tone, but then sit bolt upright in bed when their mothers voice sounded through the alarm,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Gary Smith, who directs the Centre for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “We didn’t expect the difference to be so dramatic.” 

Smith hopes that in future studies, researchers will find that a generic female voice is just as effective at waking young children since that would be an easier and cheaper alarm for companies to design. The current research “is an important step towards optimising smoke alarms for waking up young children”, he said. 

Even though the alarms currently on the market are not optimal for waking kids up, “We want to make it really clear that standard alarms work,” Smith said. “We don’t want to give the impression that parents should stop using the high-pitched tone alarms. They will wake up the adults and they can then rescue the children. They are lifesaving. In this country, about half of the residential fire deaths are in homes without alarms.” 

To take a closer look at the effect of a mother’s voice on her sleeping child, Smith and his colleagues recruited 176 children between the ages of five and 12 and brought them into the sleep lab for testing. The lab had rooms that were set up to look like a typical bedroom, Smith said. 

The children’s brain activity was monitored with electrodes on their scalp and face, and they were allowed to fall into the deepest stage of sleep. Then one of four types of simulated smoke alarm was sounded and researchers measured how long it took for a child to wake up and follow a previously rehearsed escape plan. 

The experiment was run four times with each child, each about a week apart, so that all the children were exposed to all four types of alarm: standard high-pitched tone, the mother’s voice with instructions like “wake up” and “get out of bed”, the mother’s voice saying the child’s name, and the mother’s voice saying the child’s name and then giving instructions. 

There was no significant difference in time to waking between the three alarms that used the mother’s voice. But there was a very large difference between all three of the maternal voice alarms and the standard alarm. 

Maternal voice alarms woke 86 to 91 per cent of children, prompting 84 to 86 per cent to successfully perform the escape procedure within five minutes of the alarm’s onset. That is compared to 52 per cent of kids waking to the standard alarm and 51 per cent escaping. 

Nearly 6 per cent of kids did not wake to any of the alarms and had to be manually awakened after five minutes. 

The study was not designed to determine whether a mother’s voice has a different effect on her child versus any other human voice, the authors note. Further research is also needed to determine how children’s responses are affected by the content of the voice alarm message, they write. 

“In real life terms, this could make a big difference,” said Dr Hiren Muzumdar, director of the Paediatric Sleep Evaluation Centre at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “It would seem that it could save a lot more kids.” 

It might even help save other family members, Muzumdar said. “If a fire starts near a child’s room, the child could go wake up their parents,” he explained. 

It was not surprising to Muzumdar that children might sleep through a loud blaring alarm. “Kids have a much higher threshold for arousals,” he said. “In fact, children with significant sleep apnoea rarely appear sleepy during the day because their sleep isn’t disturbed. In adults with significant sleep apnoea, there is much more daytime sleepiness,” said Muzumdar, who specialises in sleep-breathing disorders. 

Though Muzumdar would have expected children to wake more quickly to a mother’s voice, “I would have expected just a little difference,” he said. “But this is a staggering difference. It’s just remarkable.” 

People may be more likely to age without health problems when they have more omega-3 fatty acids in their blood, a recent study suggests. 

The study authors focused on so-called healthy ageing, or the number of years people live without developing disabilities or physical or mental health problems. They examined the data on 2,622 adults who were 74 years old on average, following them from 1992 to 2015. Only 11 per cent of participants experienced healthy ageing throughout the entire study period. 

“We found that older adults who had higher levels of omega-3 from seafood were more likely to live longer and healthier lives,” said lead study author Heidi Lai of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. 

“These findings support current national dietary guidelines to consume more seafood,” Lai said by e-mail. 

Adults should get about eight ounces a week of seafood, ideally by eating it twice a week in place of meats, poultry or eggs, according to US dietary guidelines. Some options that are high in omega-3s include salmon, anchovies, herring, shad, sardines, oysters, trout and Atlantic or Pacific mackerel. 

In the current study, people with the highest blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids were 18 per cent to 21 per cent less likely to experience unhealthy ageing, researchers report in the BMJ. 

Researchers measured blood levels of omega-3s at the start of the study and again after six and 13 years had passed. These included eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), docosapentaenoic acid (DPA), and alpha linolenic acid (ALA). The main dietary sources of EPA, DHA and DPA come from seafood, while ALA is found mainly in nuts, seeds and leafy green vegetables. 

Based on these measurements, researchers split participants into five groups, or quintiles, from lowest to highest levels of circulating omega-3s. 

Overall, 89 per cent of the participants experienced unhealthy ageing during the study period. 

After accounting for social, economic and lifestyle factors, researchers found that people with the highest levels of seafood-derived EPA were 24 per cent less likely to experience unhealthy ageing that individuals with the lowest levels of EPA. 

For DPA levels, participants in the top three quintiles were 18 to 21 per cent less likely to experience unhealthy ageing. But seafood-derived DHA and plant-derived ALA did not appear to influence the chance of healthy ageing. 

A possible explanation for this effect is that omega-3s help to regulate blood pressure, heart rate and inflammation, the study authors note. 

Previous research has linked omega-3s to a lower risk of abnormal heartbeats, less fats in the blood, reduced risk of artery-clogging deposits known as plaque, and slightly lower blood pressure. 

The current study was not a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how omega-3s might directly influence health. Another drawback is that it did not look at omega-3 supplements. 

It would be premature for people to make health decisions based on this study, said Yeyi Zhu of Kaiser Permanente Northern California and the University of California, San Francisco. 

“There has been accumulating evidence suggesting an inverse association between omega-3 fatty acids in food and the likelihood of cardiovascular diseases,” Zhu, author of an accompanying editorial, said by e-mail. “However, the data are inconsistent on other components of health ageing.” 

Apart from being careful with suspicious e-mails, not visiting doubtful websites and not clicking on the first invitation that insidiously entices you to “click here to solve the problem”, is there really, practically, anything else you can do to enjoy a safer Internet experience? That is without holding a PhD degree in IT or reading unreasonable amounts of technical information!

One of the simplest methods consists of browsing only websites you know well, that you frequently visit and that have proven beyond any doubt that they are reliable and clean. Usually these would be associated to big names such as, to mention a few examples only, amazon.com, cnn.com, jordantimes.com, netflix.com, mybank.com (replace with your bank actual name…), microsoft.com, and the like.

In real life, however, you cannot restrict yourself to these sites, understandably. An Internet experience goes well beyond a few sites, and only the world is the frontier. This is particularly true when you are doing a search and the results take you to uncharted territory.

In addition to having a good antivirus and Internet security software installed on your computer there is an easy way to tell if the website you have landed on is secure. Instead of starting with “http”, the URL (i.e. the address) should start with “https” — it is as simple as that. By now most sites obey this basic rule and many website hosting services, like for instance GoDaddy or HostGator, make it mandatory to design and to run secure sites.

A secure site makes it almost impossible for prying eyes or hackers to see and copy what you are doing on the website, to “catch” passwords and other sensitive data you may be entering. Professional websites must necessary comply with the security measure and have a full address that starts with “https”. This is nothing new in the world of IT and Internet, but the stress has been put on websites over the past six months or so to comply with that rule. Some hosting services have even threatened to block access to the sites unless they follow the security rule.

There are various terms that refer to the additional “s” letter. It is frequently called SSL (Secure Socket Layer) or sometimes TLS (Transport Layer Security). The good news is that Internet users have nothing to do about it, except for making sure they are browsing an address that starts with “https”, not “http”. How to make a website safe and to get an address that does indeed start with “https” is entirely the duty and the work of the website administrator or webmaster, not the users’. It is technical work that those who visit the site have nothing to do with and should not worry about.

An example: you type “www.what-a-greatsite.com”. If your browser displays “http://www.greatsite.com” in the topmost left corner, then it is not secured. If it displays “https://www.greatsite.com” then it is. Of course, nothing prevents you in the first case of staying on the page and browsing the site. Just remember that it is not as safe as it should be.

Internet security is a never-ending matter and the biggest names on the web, including Facebook to name one, have to face hacking issues every now and then — and they do not hide it! Whereas the 100-per cent-safe web experience does not and will probably never exist, browsing only SSL-TLS enabled sites does certainly reduce hacking risks significantly.

Internet authorities are working on security protocols that are supposed to be even safer than the current SSL-TLS that are — by IT standards — considered to be somewhat old now. The first version dates back to 1995! It is expected that the replacement of SSL-TLS will be implemented in less than two years from now. Some IT experts think that it will still be SSL-TLS but newer, “much improved” versions of it. Which in either case implies that webmasters will have more to learn and consequently to do in order to secure their websites in the best possible way.

For children under age 12, decongestants might ease the common cold symptoms of a blocked or running nose, but these medications may not be safe for this age group, according to a research review. 

For adults, there is little evidence that decongestants help with congestion, one of the most bothersome cold symptoms. For kids, there is no clear evidence they work at all, but plenty of research showing mild or potentially dangerous side effects, the study team writes in The BMJ. 

“The common cold is very common and affects everyone all over the world,” said lead author Dr Mieke van Driel of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. 

The common cold is caused by a virus and tends to run its course in seven to 10 days, the authors write. Typically, children have about six to eight colds per year, and adults have two to four. 

To see what symptoms patients find most bothersome, van Driel and colleagues asked 10 customers seeking over-the-counter treatments at a community pharmacy in Belgium what concerned them the most. 

“Evidence about health is only relevant if it addresses things that matter to patients,” van Driel said by e-mail. “We wanted to make sure our evidence summary was useful to them and asked them to guide us.” 

The customers heavily emphasised nasal symptoms, so the research team decided to focus their research review on treatments for congestion, a runny nose and sneezing. 

The researchers looked at studies assessing the effects of decongestants, antihistamines, analgesics, intranasal corticosteroids, herbal remedies, vitamins and minerals such as zinc, as well as saline nasal rinses, vapour rub and inhaled steam. 

Overall, they found little evidence to support the idea that any over-the-counter cold treatments help nasal symptoms significantly, and the drugs tend to have side effects such as insomnia, drowsiness, headache and stomachache. 

They also found few trials in children under age 12. One study found low evidence that saline irrigations or drops could be safe for young children. A few small studies reported contradictory results for the effectiveness of decongestants and antihistamines in kids. 

In one review, which covered four randomised controlled trials with a total of 1,466 adult participants, sedating antihistamines helped with runny nose and sneezing symptoms but not nasal congestion. With non-sedating antihistamines, however, none of the symptoms seemed to improve. 

Antibiotics and intranasal corticosteroids were not shown to improve symptoms either. 

When it comes to more “natural” remedies, the researchers found that clinical trials investigating Echinacea, vitamin C, zinc lozenges, and heated humidified steam did not even address nasal symptoms. One review concluded that saline irrigations were not likely to be effective. Zinc was shown to reduce the overall duration but not the severity of cold symptoms. 

“Vitamin C is usually perceived as an effective, harmless and inexpensive therapeutic alternative,” said Angela Ortigoza of Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, who was not involved in the current study. 

Although vitamin C does help the immune system, taking it to prevent a common cold usually will not work, they said. 

“It might be difficult to make patients desist from such deep-rooted preconceived ideas, even considering the certainty of this evidence, so variability in decision-making is to be expected,” she said. 

The study team didn’t find any studies of probiotics, garlic, Chinese medicinal herbs, vapour rub, eucalyptus oil, honey, ginseng or increased fluid intake for nasal cold symptoms. 

There are 17 ongoing trials investigating common cold treatments, including 12 for adults, four for kids and one for all ages. Five trials will report on nasal symptoms, including one for kids, van Driel noted. 

“There are some trials in the pipeline studying herbal remedies, but we think it is unlikely that these products will be effective enough to make a real difference in well-being and illness,” van Driel said. “The search for a ‘magic bullet for the common cold’ may need to take another approach.” 

While switching channels on television the other day, I came across a tutorial on how to attach sleeves into the armholes of a sleeveless dress. The lady giving the demonstration was very chatty and pointed towards a garment that she bought earlier, which had fitted her perfectly. Subsequently she had put on weight and felt obliged to sheathe her arms with the addition of extra cloth, which was the reason for her to teach us to do the same, if we ever found ourselves in a similar situation. 

Her accent gave her away and even without reading the ticker revealing her name, I could figure out that she belonged to the Indian state of Punjab. Also, although she was bordering on plumpness she preferred to refer to herself as “healthy”, a term that all my relatives used to disguise their various stages of obesity. 

Punjabis — all those portly people from my tribe — were a fun-loving lot. No one could deny that but we were obviously overweight too. However for some strange reason, all the fat folks in Punjab were considered as healthy. The potbelly or a paunch was believed to be a sign of prosperity! More money, more food seemed to be the faulty reasoning. In fact, men and women who did not become fat after matrimony were seen as belonging to a loveless or unsuccessful marriage where there was not enough good food for everyone. Conversely being thin meant being impoverished-economically, socially and aesthetically. 

About twenty years ago, many of our super successful film stars were fat too and danced around trees with a potbelly jiggling in front of them. Nobody thought it unusual and no director asked him or her to go to the gym to slim down. It was very much a norm, not an aberration. 

Soon, everyone was paying the price for this distorted thinking, as the level of type two diabetes in our country soared to unprecedented levels. The fat deposition around the abdomen, called central obesity, was the main cause, with the growing waistline being the chief culprit. 

The International Diabetes Federation in October 2009 ranked India as the country with the most diabetes patients in the world. The umbrella group of more than 200 national associations estimated that the disease would kill about 1 million Indians that year. Contracting diabetes led to an elevated risk of a whole lot of other complications including cardio-vascular diseases and kidney problems.

Slowly but surely, the old logic of “fat is fit” switched to modern standards of nourishment where being obese was recognised as a sign of malnutrition. When it was reported that nearly half of the policemen in the Northern city of Chandigarh were too fat to do their job, the potbellied ones were forced to fight the flab in the many gyms that were installed in every police station. 

While one sees a maximum number of protruding bellies in Delhi, the capital city of India, the term “Delhi belly” has a different meaning altogether. This phrase is generally used to describe a traveller’s upset stomach or intestinal infection caused by eating or drinking contaminated food or water.

“You’re looking lovely,” I complimented my niece recently. 

“Thanks,” she replied shyly. 

“My child is weak now,” my cousin remarked.

“She used to be so healthy,” she continued.

“I was obese mum,” my niece corrected her mother. 

“Then she went to India,” my cousin said.

“What happened there?” I asked. 

“Thank God for Delhi belly,” my niece beamed.

ROME — Italy’s competition authority on Wednesday said it was fining Apple and Samsung 10 and 5 million euros ($11.5 and $5.7 million) respectively for the so-called “planned obsolescence” of their smartphones.

The ruling is believed to be the first against the manufacturers following accusations worldwide that they encourage operating system updates for older phones which slow them down, thereby encouraging the purchase of new phones.

Two “complex investigations” by the anti-trust authority AGCM revealed that Apple and Samsung implemented unfair commercial practices, a statement said.

“The two companies have induced consumers to install software updates that are not adequately supported by their devices, without adequately informing them, nor providing them an effective way to recover the full functionality of their devices,” the AGCM said.

Operating system updates “caused serious malfunctions and significantly reduced their performance, in this way speeding up their replacement with more recent products”.

Samsung “insistently suggested” to owners of its 2014 Note 4 phone to install a new version of Google’s Android operating system intended for the more recent Note 7, the ACGM said.

But that was “without informing them of the serious malfunctions that the new firmware could cause due to greater stress of device’s hardware and asking a high repair cost for out-of-warranty repairs connected to such malfunctions”.

Likewise, Apple “insistently suggested” to iPhone 6 owners to install an operating system designed for the iPhone 7, “without warning consumers that its installation could reduce the speed of execution and functionality of devices”.

‘No support’

Apple “did not offer any specific support measures for iPhones that had experienced such operating problems and were no longer covered by the legal warranty; only in December 2017 Apple provided for the possibility to replace batteries at a discounted price”.

Apple was also found not to have told customers about “essential” characteristics of its phones’ lithium batteries, “such as their average duration and deterioration factors, nor about the correct procedures to maintain, verify and replace batteries in order to preserve full functionality of devices”.

Both companies were fined the maximum possible, Apple paying double Samsung’s five-million-euro fine because of its two contested practices.

The Italian anti-trust authority opened its investigation in January following customer complaints around the same time as a similar probe in France.

The US company was forced to admit last year that it intentionally slowed down older models of its iPhones over time, sparking concerns it was unfairly nudging consumers to upgrade.

At first, Apple had denied it intentionally shortened the life on any of its products. It said it slowed models to extend the performance of the phone — which uses less power when running at slower speeds — and to prevent unexpected shutdowns.

The California-based group also faces a class-action suit in the United States and a slew of lawsuits in Russia.

Samsung in January said that it “does not provide the software updates to reduce the product performance over the life cycle of the device, according to reports”. It pledged to cooperate with the Italian authorities.

The companies will be required to publish an “amending declaration” on their Italian websites with a link to the AGCM’s ruling.

There was no immediate reaction to the Italian decision from Apple or Samsung.

LONDON — October 31, 2008 marked the birth of Bitcoin. Ten years on, the world’s first cryptocurrency is at the forefront of a complex financial system viewed warily by markets and investors.

From its first evocation amid a global financial crisis, in a white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown pseudonym, Bitcoin conveyed a political vision.

The “abstract” set out in the paper for Bitcoin, currently worth about $6,400 per unit from a starting point of virtually zero, was for “a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [that] would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”.

A decade on, this continues to be carried out via a decentralised registry system known as a blockchain. 

Such ambition for a cryptocurrency was fuelled by the bankruptcy of US investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008, an event that discredited the traditional system of “a small elite of bankers... [that] establishes monetary rules imposed on everybody”, according to Pierre Noizat, founder of the first French Bitcoin exchange in 2011.

Following its creation, Bitcoin evolved for several years away from the public eye, grabbing the attention for the most part of geeks and criminals — the latter seeing it as a way to launder money.

After Bitcoin surpassed $1,000 for the first time in 2013, it began to attract the attention of financial institutions.

The European Central Bank compared it to a Ponzi scheme, but Ben Bernanke, then head of the US Federal Reserve, hailed its potential.

A turbulent childhood

In early 2014, the cryptocurrency faced its biggest crisis to date, with the hacking of the Mt. Gox platform, where about 80 per cent of all Bitcoins were traded.

The result was a collapse in their value, leading to predictions of the virtual currency’s death. 

It took until early 2017 for Bitcoin’s price to fully recover.

That marked the start of a “turning point” according to Noizat, as the controversial cryptocurrency then rocketed to more than $19,500 by the end of the year according to Bloomberg data. 

That meant Bitcoin had a total capitalisation of more than $300 billion, according to the specialised website Coinmarketcap. 

By January 2018 the value of all cryptocurrencies exceeded $800 billion, before the bubble burst. 

The concept of a digital currency has progressed substantially thanks to Bitcoin, cryptocurrency analyst Bob McDowall told AFP, pointing to the creation of 2,000 rivals.

“It becomes more than a technological, economic innovation. It almost becomes a religion for some people,” he noted.

According to Anthony Lesoismier, co-founder of investment fund Swissborg which offers portfolios based on blockchain, “the real revolution has been on a philosophical level”.

But for economist Nouriel Roubini, decentralisation in crypto is a myth. 

“It is a system more centralised than North Korea. Miners are centralised, exchanges are centralised, developers are centralised dictators,” Roubini Tweeted.

If the initial idea was for Bitcoin to facilitate payments, a majority of observers recognise that it is used above all as a store of value or as a speculative instrument owing to volatility in its value. 

“You need 20 years for this kind of... technology to take hold completely,” said Noizat, who is banking on faster transaction speeds for Bitcoin.

As it stands, about five to ten Bitcoin transactions can be processed per second compared with several thousand for Visa cards.

Looking ahead, US market regulators are considering applications for Bitcoin-based exchange-traded funds, which if approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission would see the virtual currency become part of a financial system it set out to bypass.

“We must cross some bridges in the short term” to generate the general public’s interest and trust, said Lesoismier, who described himself as both an “idealist” and “realist”.