What is Bitcoin? And what is the entire hubbub around it? Why are early bitcoin wallet users now millionaires? Why are so many countries against it and banks so scared of it?To answer all these questions that come to your mind when you see this word floating through the internet,read this article that explains what Bitcoin is, how it works, what is its value and how is it different from that money in your pocket.A currency note printed by the governments but made by a bit of code, powered by the citizens of the internet.
- What is it?
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a virtual currency that is secured by cryptography which allows transactions to be safe and anonymous by means of encrypted data. It is decentralized, that means it is not governed or validated by a central body but is a product of blockchain technology.
Blockchain is a public, distributed ledger that registers transactions between two participants in a verifiable and unalterable way. The copies of this ledger are open tousers spread all over the world called data-miners, who in turn for a small monetary reward and using their own computational power, confirm transactions through each block that contains a time stamp and transactional data from all the previous blocks, forming a chain.Thus, maintaining the integrity of transactional data by automatically updating at each transaction, keeping it resistant to any modifications and avoiding double-spending.
- How did it come to be?
To know this, we have to go back to the 1960s, when the first type of digital currency was created, i.e., the credit card. It was way easier to carry a plastic card that you can use to buy anything you wanted. Freeing us, from carrying all that cash around is an advantage. It was safe, fast and easier to use than actual cash.