What exactly is bitcoin?

What exactly is bitcoin?

Bitcoin is one of the myriad cryptocurrencies floating around the interwebs, and perhaps the most recognizable. Coins like Dogecoin exist for the memes, and Ethereum is a close secomd to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, however, continues to be the largest of its kind in terms of total market value. It is a peer- to-peer system, not quite torrents, in that there is no cetrelized server, reositoryor administrator handling transactions. Instead, the transactions take place between users directly, without amy sort of intemediary involved.
These transactions are verified by several network nodes, and then recorded in a publicly distributed ledger, clled the blockchain. The blockchin is what facilitates the magic of any crpto- currency. In the case of Bitcoin, it uses bitcon as its unit of account.

Why bitcoin is immune to Inflation

All currencies, like the dollar and euro, are vulnerable to inflation, however bitcoin was designed in a manner that specifically prevents it they are released in controlled amounts that are continually halved, in a manner that ensures that there will only ever be 21 million coins in cirulation. However, this cap will probably eventually have to be raised, as there are already 16, 305,238 coins in circulation (77% of the total bitcoin value). There is also a certain amount of bitcoins that invariably lost, either by hard dirves, theft fo devices, wallet details getting lost, or just simply by being thrown away. These factors are accounted into the bitcoin price by online bitcoin exchange.

How are bitcoins secure?

If bitcoins only exsit digitally, then what is to stop someone from hacking all the bitcoins to steal them, or just shutting the system down for the lulz?. This is an important question. If bitcoins were even a little bit insecure, they would have no value. It’d be like people to invest in a pile of money that’s left out in the open, in crowded town square.

As we now know, there is on central bitcoin server. Any and all informaton about bitcoins is hosted on millions of computers that house bitcoin wallets. Now is about when you’d say “Hang on there just a second, doesn’t that just mean that it’d be even easiwe to hack, since the only information I’d have to change would be my computer?”

This is where the blockchain comes into play. Every bitcoin has it’s own uniquely identifying, really long hexadecimal code (in base 16, using A-F in place of 10-15, meaning you can represent bigger values with fewer numbers). Whenever you thansat with bitcoin somewhere, a broadcast is send to everyone on the blockhain, saying that this wallet address is sending these specific bitcoins to that wallet address.