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 and Litecoin use fundamentally different cryptographic algorithms: Bitcoin uses the longstanding SHA-256 algorithm, and Litecoin uses a newer algorithm called Scrypt.34british bitcoin bitcoin vpn bitcoin neteller pool bitcoin обзор bitcoin
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In a PoW blockchain network, if the block time is too low, it would increase the likelihood of nodes producing orphan blocks, for which they would receive no reward. Orphan blocks are produced by nodes who solved the task but did not broadcast their results to the whole network the quickest due to network latency.It takes time for a message to travel through a network, and it is entirely possible for 2 nodes to complete the task and start to broadcast their results to the network at roughly the same time, while one’s messages are received by all other nodes earlier as the node has low latency.Imagine there is a network latency of 1 minute and a target block time of 2 minutes. A node could solve the task in around 1 minute but his message would take 1 minute to reach the rest of the nodes that are still working on the solution. While his message travels through the network, all the work done by all other nodes during that 1 minute, even if these nodes also complete the task, would go to waste. In this case, 50% of the computational power contributed to the network is wasted.The percentage of wasted computational power would proportionally decrease if the mining difficulty were higher, as it would statistically take longer for miners to complete the task. In other words, if the mining difficulty, and therefore targeted block time is low, miners with powerful and often centralized mining facilities would get a higher chance of becoming the block producer, while the participation of weaker miners would become in vain. This introduces possible centralization and weakens the overall security of the network.However, given a limited amount of transactions that can be stored in a block, making the block time too long would decrease the number of transactions the network can process per second, negatively affecting network scalability.ethereum forks bitcoin dynamics zona bitcoin github bitcoin bitcoin global bitcoin автоматически логотип ethereum ethereum cpu bitcoin pizza bitcoin loans monero free attack bitcoin bitcoin spend easy bitcoin ethereum russia monero hardfork ethereum mine kurs bitcoin баланс bitcoin bitcoin trojan 999 bitcoin
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