If you are an adept financial trend enthusiast and interested about digital streams of income, you surely must have heard about Bitcoin . I know you may be a little bit confused but i will attempt to try and break it down in a series of articles that may convert you and me into Bitcoin believers.
Bitcoin was invented as a peer-to-peer system for online payments, it does not require a trusted central authority. Since its inception in 2008, Bitcoin has grown into a technology, a currency, an investment vehicle, and a community of users.
Bitcoin’s rise to prominence is causing a global rethink of the concept of money. For thousands of years, gold was the currency of the land, and many of gold’s qualities have allowed it to stand the test of time. As civilization developed and industrialized, ruling bodies learned that printing a government’s own currency, called fiat, was a more convenient and easier method of distributing wealth in society.
However, government-backed money has not stood the test of time; the average life of fiat currency is only 27 years. History is littered with examples of the failure of money, such as the Mark in post-WWI Weimar Germany and the Greek drachma in 1944.
Fast forward to the 21st century, where there are more mobile phones than there are people on earth, and perhaps it makes sense for a more global form of money to exist. Bitcoin is exactly that: a universal, internet currency that can work on any computer or mobile phone.
Bitcoin allows for trust between two unrelated parties over an untrustworthy network like the Internet, with just a mobile phone any two parties can now transact without a central authority, company or bank mediating the transaction and in such a way that is safe and secure, publicly known, and un contestable.
ORIGIN OF BITCOIN
Similar to the way e-mail is a messaging rail that exists freely on
the Internet for anyone to use globally 24/7, bitcoin is a payments rail
that also exists freely on the Internet for anyone to use globally
24/7. Bitcoin (a crypto-currency, abbreviated BTC) was released in
January of 2009 as a first-of-its-kind free payments system.It does not require a credit card, bank account or the divulging of any personal identification to use or acquire. The catch is that you’re not using any government-backed fiat currency in this system. It uses a new currency altogether: bitcoin.
Before bitcoin was released there was a white paper entitled “Bitcoin, a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, that was published in November 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi is an alias, and this creator of bitcoin has chosen to remain anonymous even to this day.
Bitcoin enables users to remit money in minutes, for a fraction of the cost, using only a cell phone. Further, Bitcoin provides the rails to go from one currency to another using the Internet as a middleman (which is free) instead of companies like Western Union (not free).
Where do Bitcoins come from?
Some users put their computers to work verifying transactions in the
peer-to-peer network mentioned above. These users are rewarded with new
bitcoins proportional to the amount of computing power they donate to
the network.This process is called “Mining”
Mining is the term used for running a series of calculations on a computer to verify the transactions that take place in the Bitcoin network. About every ten minutes, a new block of transaction data is created and the miners who created the block are awarded a few bitcoins. This serves the Bitcoin network both as a system to verify transactions and as a system for fairly distributing new bitcoins.
The process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin’s public ledger of past transactions. This ledger of past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks. The block chain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place. Bitcoin nodes use the block chain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere Bitcoin nodes use the block chain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.
Although it used to be profitable to mine Bitcoins with your standard personal computer, the cost of the electricity necessary to do so is now greater than the value of the bitcoins you could mine. Profitable mining now requires specialized hardware that can perform more computations with greater power efficiency.
In the next article we will discuss in detail the intricacies that is involved in mining and the pros and cons of being a miner.
If you are an organization offering different services in the Bitcoin process contact me for vetting and analysis and I might include your name in the articles to follow.
Welcome to the Digital world folks.
Culled from sister site http://dakkyworkdiaries.com/2017/01/16/getting-info-on-block-chain-technology-and-the-bitcoin-rush/
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