If we had to respond to one sentence on the question of what a bitcoin is, we would have chosen the words of Mark Andresen, who in 2014, in a New York Times article, said:
Bitcoin is a revolution comparable to the Internet in the 1990s and PCs in the 1970s.
These are the words of a man who not only has managed one of the most successful venture capital funds in the world for years, but is also a proven visionary largely directly responsible for the Internet, as we know him today.
The article below will only list, without explaining, the basic features of bitcoin. It contains multiple links to other articles on the site that explain in detail how and why the technology works. We hope to serve you as a guide to the technological leap that bitcoin represents for our civilization.
What is bitcoin?
bitcoin is both a global payment system and a currency unit.
Currency bitcoin is not issued and not guaranteed by a government, organization or company. It is supported and defended by tens of thousands of computers worldwide, whose combined power is thousands of times greater than the computing power of Google, Amazon, and IBM combined. The value of a bitcoin is based on this computational power, as well as its benefits, which we will talk about below.
By virtue of a mathematical law, the number of all bitcoin is limited to 21 million bitcoins, and by the year 2017 only a little over 18 million of them have been created. On average every 10 minutes, a new 12.5 bitcoin is being won, distributed among the owners of the computers mentioned above, a process known as bit-digging. Notice that every bitcoin consists of a hundred million satoshi, as they call the pennies of a bitcoin. And that's why - although the cost of a bitcoin is already over $ 17,000 - with a bitcoin, payments of less than one cent may be made.
The bitcoin payment system is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network. We can pay with a bitcoin without the need for intermediaries - no banks, visa and mastercard, paypal, and the like. Fee charges are minimal and do not depend on either the size or the payee. In fact, at bitcoin, state borders do not exist - once turned into a bitcoin, your money is available from anywhere in the world where the internet is.
Your fighters are inviolable - no power can gain access to them unless they have the private key for the address they are in. It may even be said that bitcoin is the first technology in the history of humanity that is stronger than the state and the centralized power in it. That is why many of us are perceiving a bitterly not as a modern currency on the Internet, but as a social resistance to the status quo.
bitcoin payment security is based on public key cryptography, thus avoiding the need to share personal data (such as names, address, card number, etc.) when paying. This traditional cryptography is based on the traditional banking system.
Bitcoin price
Bitcoin price changes dramatically every day. You can see the bitcoin price chart on pricebitcoinnews.com
