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.
bitcoin network Ether is not tied to a central bank, and as such its price fluctuations are influenced by trader speculation. There is no ceiling for how much Ether can be produced, so there is always a risk of inflation or lack of interest having an effect on the price of this cryptocurrency.Segregated Witness (often abbreviated to SegWit) is a protocol upgrade proposal that went live in May 20172 for Litecoin (vs. August 2017 for Bitcoin).It separates witness signatures from transaction-related data. Witness signatures in 'legacy Bitcoin blocks' often take more than 50% of the block size. By removing witness signatures from the transaction block, this protocol effectively increases the number of transactions that can be stored in a single block, rendering the network capable of handling more transactions per second. As a result, SegWit increases the scalability of Nakamoto consensus-based blockchain networks Litecoin.SegWit also makes transactions cheaper. Since transaction fees are derived from how much data is being processed by the block producer, the more transactions that can be stored in a 1MB block, the cheaper individual transactions become.bitcoin central
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In aggregate, as a currency and economic system, bitcoin benefits from disorder. It is the constant exposure to stressors, volatility and randomness which causes bitcoin to evolve, adapt and ultimately to become stronger in near-uniform fashion and in a way that would not be possible in the absence of disorder. Bitcoin may still be young, but it is not temporary. It was released into the wild, and what has spawned is a system that cannot be controlled or shut down. It’s both everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time. It is like an elusive ghost. Its decentralized and permissionless state eliminates single points of failure and drives innovation, ultimately ensuring both its survival and a constant strengthening of its immune system as a function of time, trial and error. Bitcoin is beyond resilient. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; bitcoin gets better. While it is easy to fall into a trap, believing bitcoin to be untested, unproven and not permanent, it is precisely the opposite. Bitcoin has been constantly tested for going on 12 years, each time proving to be up to the challenge and emerging from each test in a stronger state. At the end of the day, bitcoin is more permanent than it is risky because of antifragility. As a currency system, it manages to extend the utilization of resources beyond the control of deliberately coordinated effort, entirely dispensing with the need of conscious control all together. Bitcoin is the antifragile competitor to the inherently fragile legacy monetary system. On the one hand, a legacy system crippled by moral hazard, dependent on trust and centralized control. One that accumulates imbalance and fragility when exposed to stress and disorder, principally as a function of trillions in bailouts with each passing shock, which only further weakens its immune system. That compared to bitcoin which is a system devoid of moral hazard and which operates flawlessly on a decentralized basis, without trust and without bailouts. It eliminates imbalance and sources of fragility as a constant process, further strengthening the currency system as a whole and as a function of time. What doesn’t kill the legacy monetary system only makes it weaker. What doesn’t kill bitcoin only makes it stronger. monero кран ethereum pow bitcoin euro vector bitcoin wechat bitcoin tether yota проект bitcoin чат bitcoin bitcoin golden bitcoin icons tp tether bitcoin group bitcoin таблица
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The world has never seen this before, and there is now a certain inevitability that markets around the world will gradually gravitate toward this superior money. Money is a good like all others, in that it competes for the attention of those using it.minergate ethereum bitcoin escrow bitcoin spinner ютуб bitcoin bitcoin brokers запросы bitcoin avatrade bitcoin bitcoin payza habrahabr bitcoin инструмент bitcoin sec bitcoin ethereum chart hyip bitcoin bitcoin slots bitcoin joker bitcoin клиент keyhunter bitcoin рейтинг bitcoin калькулятор monero
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