what is bitcoin?
Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency that emerged in 2009 by an unknown person our group named Satoshi Nakamoto. It's connected using peer-to-peer network and everyone that uses bitcoin is apart of the bank of bitcoin. It's decentralized, which means that every transaction you make is anonymous and nobody will know who sent the transaction.
Not even the government can monitor your transaction.
It is using the algorithm: SHA-256, which is a complex mathematical algorithm used to verify the transactions made on the block chain.
The process is called mining.
what is the block chain?
The block chain is the ledger of all transactions that has been made with bitcoin or any altcoin. It's managed by the peer-to-peer network and every transaction on the block chain are called blocks.
The peers connect to the bitcoin network are validating every new bitcoin or altcoin transaction so that it will become a genuine transaction and not double spend transaction.
The first conception of the block chain was created in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto and was used in the bitcoin network to save the transaction. Every valid block are found by miners who verifies the incoming transaction and store it in the public ledger.
what is mining?
Mining is when you crunch the numbers of a transaction to confirm it's a legitimate transaction, it's solved using complex mathematical algorithms. When a block gets mined, it gets put into the block chain, and the miner who mined the block gets a reward of 12.5 BTC (as of 2017). every 4 years, the reward halves. In 2020, the reward will be 6.25 BTC per mined block. But, as more people start joining in, the higher the difficulty gets to. In the early days when bitcoin was worth $0.01 and when the difficulty was low, the CPU of your computer was enough to mine bitcoins. But the problem was that it was power consuming and that it got slow overtime as the difficulty started to rise. Later, in 2010, the first bitcoin miner was released. It was faster, but still power consuming. But then, in 2013, they released ASIC miners (Application-specific integrated circuit) which was a lot faster, while using less electricity.
It was a huge success, outclassing CPUs and GPUs in terms of mining.
Nowadays, it's impossible to make a profit mining bitcoins with a PC.
what's the pros of bitcoin?
° it's decentralised: with paper money, the government decides when they print out money, and can sometimes monitor the transaction. But with bitcoin, there is no government or organisation that distribute bitcoins to people.
° it's anonymous: because there aren't governments that control the currency. Unlike the banks when you buy something for example, then they look at the order and send the money, with bitcoin, when you make a transaction, it gets put on the block chain, waiting to get confirmed. Once it gets confirmed, the bitcoins are then instantly sent to the recipient.
° no fees: right now, there are little or no fees when make a payment in bitcoin, though the users can sometimes include a fee for a faster transaction, as it will get more priority on the bitcoin network, which means it will arrive faster.
what are the cons of bitcoin?
°lack of awareness: although it has existed for 8 years, a lot of people still don't know about the cryptocurrency, which means that they need to be educated about bitcoin if they wanna 'apply' it to their life.
°the volatility risks: bitcoin has a volatility rate due to bitcoin having a finite supply (16,366,275 BTC out of 21,000,000 BTC on June 1st 2017) and that the demands for bitcoin increases as time goes on.
°it's still in development: although it existed since 2009, it's still in infancy stage (beta stage), which means that there are still features waiting to get implemented into the bitcoin network. like any currencies, Bitcoin still has to work out the problems like any other currencies at the beginning stage.
It's fascinating how time goes fast, as for bitcoin, it will still be in development.
Bitcoin-the future of money
what is bitcoin?
Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency that emerged in 2009 by an unknown person our group named Satoshi Nakamoto. It's connected using peer-to-peer network and everyone that uses bitcoin is apart of the bank of bitcoin. It's decentralized, which means that every transaction you make is anonymous and nobody will know who sent the transaction.
Not even the government can monitor your transaction.
It is using the algorithm: SHA-256, which is a complex mathematical algorithm used to verify the transactions made on the block chain.
The process is called mining.
what is the block chain?
The block chain is the ledger of all transactions that has been made with bitcoin or any altcoin. It's managed by the peer-to-peer network and every transaction on the block chain are called blocks.
The peers connect to the bitcoin network are validating every new bitcoin or altcoin transaction so that it will become a genuine transaction and not double spend transaction.
The first conception of the block chain was created in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto and was used in the bitcoin network to save the transaction. Every valid block are found by miners who verifies the incoming transaction and store it in the public ledger.
what is mining?
Mining is when you crunch the numbers of a transaction to confirm it's a legitimate transaction, it's solved using complex mathematical algorithms. When a block gets mined, it gets put into the block chain, and the miner who mined the block gets a reward of 12.5 BTC (as of 2017). every 4 years, the reward halves. In 2020, the reward will be 6.25 BTC per mined block. But, as more people start joining in, the higher the difficulty gets to. In the early days when bitcoin was worth $0.01 and when the difficulty was low, the CPU of your computer was enough to mine bitcoins. But the problem was that it was power consuming and that it got slow overtime as the difficulty started to rise. Later, in 2010, the first bitcoin miner was released. It was faster, but still power consuming. But then, in 2013, they released ASIC miners (Application-specific integrated circuit) which was a lot faster, while using less electricity.
It was a huge success, outclassing CPUs and GPUs in terms of mining.
Nowadays, it's impossible to make a profit mining bitcoins with a PC.
what's the pros of bitcoin?
° it's decentralised: with paper money, the government decides when they print out money, and can sometimes monitor the transaction. But with bitcoin, there is no government or organisation that distribute bitcoins to people.
° it's anonymous: because there aren't governments that control the currency. Unlike the banks when you buy something for example, then they look at the order and send the money, with bitcoin, when you make a transaction, it gets put on the block chain, waiting to get confirmed. Once it gets confirmed, the bitcoins are then instantly sent to the recipient.
° no fees: right now, there are little or no fees when make a payment in bitcoin, though the users can sometimes include a fee for a faster transaction, as it will get more priority on the bitcoin network, which means it will arrive faster.
what are the cons of bitcoin?
°lack of awareness: although it has existed for 8 years, a lot of people still don't know about the cryptocurrency, which means that they need to be educated about bitcoin if they wanna 'apply' it to their life.
°the volatility risks: bitcoin has a volatility rate due to bitcoin having a finite supply (16,366,275 BTC out of 21,000,000 BTC on June 1st 2017) and that the demands for bitcoin increases as time goes on.
°it's still in development: although it existed since 2009, it's still in infancy stage (beta stage), which means that there are still features waiting to get implemented into the bitcoin network. like any currencies, Bitcoin still has to work out the problems like any other currencies at the beginning stage.
It's fascinating how time goes fast, as for bitcoin, it will still be in development.