What Is Bitcoin?
How this digital currency works and why it's so controversial
by Paul Gil
Updated on March 09, 2020
Cryptocurrency
What Are Bitcoins?
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Bitcoin is a virtual currency that gained recognition after its price-per-coin rose above $13,000 in early 2018. The cryptocurrency (one of many) is at the center of a complex intersection of privacy, banking regulations, and technological innovation. Today, some retailers accept bitcoin, while in other jurisdictions, bitcoin is illegal.
Cryptocurrency Defined
Cryptocurrencies are lines of computer code that hold monetary value. These lines of code are created by electricity and high-performance computers.
Cryptocurrency is also known as digital currency. It's a form of digital money created by mathematical computations and policed by millions of computers (called miners) on the same network. Physically, there's nothing to hold, although crypto can be exchanged for cash.
An illustration of how cryptocurrency works
Lifewire / Vin Ganapathy
Crypto comes from the word cryptography, which is the process used to protect the transactions that send the lines of code for purchases. Cryptography also controls the creation of new coins. Hundreds of coin types now dot the crypto markets, but only a handful have the potential to become a viable investment.
Governments have no control over the creation of cryptocurrencies, which is what initially made them so popular. Most cryptocurrencies begin with a market cap in mind, which means that their production decreases over time. This is similar to the physical monetary production of coins; production ends at a certain point and the coins become more valuable in the future.
What Are Bitcoins?
Bitcoin was the first popular cryptocurrency. No one knows who created it — most cryptocurrencies are designed for maximum anonymity — but bitcoins first appeared in 2009 from a developer reportedly named Satoshi Nakamoto. He has since disappeared and left behind a bitcoin fortune.
Because bitcoin was the first major cryptocurrency, all digital currencies created since then are called altcoins, or alternative coins. Litecoin, Peercoin, Feathercoin, Ethereum, and hundreds of other coins are all altcoins because they are not bitcoin.
One of the advantages of bitcoin is that it can be stored offline on local hardware, such as a secure hard drive. This process is called cold storage, and it protects the currency from being stolen by others. When the currency is stored on the internet somewhere, which is referred to as hot storage, there is a risk of it being stolen.
On the flip side, if a person loses access to the hardware that contains the bitcoins, the currency is gone forever. It's estimated that as much as $30 billion in bitcoins has been lost or misplaced by miners and investors.
Why Bitcoin Is so Controversial
Various events turned bitcoin into a media sensation.
From 2011 to 2013, criminal traders made bitcoins famous by buying them in batches of millions of dollars so they could move money outside of the eyes of law enforcement and tax collectors. Subsequently, the value of bitcoins skyrocketed.
Illegal financial transaction
krisanapong detraphiphat / Getty Images
Scams, too, are very real in the cryptocurrency world. Naive and savvy investors alike can lose hundreds or thousands of dollars to scams.
Bitcoins and altcoins are controversial because they take the power of issuing money away from central banks and give it to the general public. Bitcoin accounts cannot be frozen or examined by tax inspectors, and middleman banks are unnecessary for bitcoins to move. Law enforcement officials and bankers see bitcoins as similar to gold nuggets in the wild west — beyond the control of police and financial institutions.
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ethereum contracts bitcoin weekly Most people trace the beginnings of blockchain back to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin Whitepaper of 2008. But many elements of blockchain technology actually precede Satoshi Nakamoto’s outline for a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.For the full node operator, running the daemon and storing the chain, the benefit of dedicating hard drive space to the Bitcoin blockchain is 'minimally trusted' transactions; that is, he or she can send and receive Bitcoin without needing to trust anyone else’s copy of the ledger, which might be contain errors or purposeful falsifications.In 2016, known as the DAO event, an exploit in the original Ethereum smart contracts resulted in multiple transactions, creating additional $50 million. Subsequently, the currency was forked into Ethereum Classic, and Ethereum, with the latter continuing with the new blockchain without the exploited transactions.Currency is usable if it is a store of value, or, put differently, if it can reliably be counted on to maintain its relative value over time and without depreciating. In many societies throughout history, commodities or precious metals were used as methods of payment because they were seen as having a relatively stable value. Rather than require individuals to carry around cumbersome quantities of cocoa beans, gold or other early forms of currency, however, societies eventually turned to minted currency as an alternative. Still, the reason many examples of minted currency were usable was because they were reliable stores of value, having been made out of metals with long shelf lives and little risk of depreciation.2ethereum bitcoin блок Everything beyond this fundamental reality strays into abstract theory, relying on leaps of faith, hypotheticals and big words that no one understands, all while divorced from individual decision points. It is not that one individual is more trusted than another or one central bank relative to another; it is simply that, on an individual level, no individual is advantaged by someone else having the ability to print money, regardless of identity or interests. That this is true leaves only one alternative, that each individual would be advantaged by ensuring that no other individual or entity has this power. The Fed may have the ability to create dollars at zero cost, but money still doesn’t grow on trees. It is more likely that a particular form of money is not actually money than it is that money miraculously started growing on trees. And at an individual level, everyone is incentivized to ensure that is not the case. While there is a long habit of not thinking this particular thing wrong, the errant defense of custom can only stray so far. Time converts everyone back into reality. At present, it is the Fed’s 'shock and awe' campaign contrasted by the simplicity in bitcoin’s fixed supply of 21 million. There is no amount of reason that can replace an observed divergence in two distinct paths.bitcoin робот bitcoin сбербанк bitcoin status roboforex bitcoin trinity bitcoin работа bitcoin bitcoin darkcoin buy ethereum bitcoin fpga ava bitcoin bitcoin weekly сложность bitcoin bitcoin invest ethereum пулы erc20 ethereum курс ethereum ethereum course 6000 bitcoin партнерка bitcoin ad bitcoin bitcoin сервер ethereum токены mempool bitcoin bitcoin china bitcoin alliance
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