What is Bitcoin ?

 

Bitcoin is an electronic currency. But unlike government issued currencies, there is no single entity that issues Bitcoin, or is in charge of processing its transactions. Before Bitcoin, it was not possible to make electronic payments without the help of a third party, like a bank, or payment processor. payments were often slow, expensive, and not available to everyone. To solve those problems, Bitcoin operates without a trusted third party. Instead, it works as a purely peer to peer electronic currency, meaning that payments are sent directly from one person to another. How does that work? Simply put computers all over the world use mathematical functions to independently verify all Bitcoin transactions, which are then added to a public permanent list of transactions called the blockchain. The blockchain is stored on all of those computers, and works as a secure universal record of who owns what, early on in bitcoins history, there are very few transactions being processed by the network. But as time went on, more and more people started using Bitcoin, and so the number of transactions to be processed went up to eventually the Bitcoin network needed to be updated to keep transactions fast, cheap and reliable. But because there wasn't consensus on how this update should be performed, or whether it should be implemented at all, Bitcoin ultimately had to split into two separate currencies for that update to happen. The version that implemented the originally planned update is called bitcoin cash, which is listed on exchanges using the ticker symbol bch. Bitcoin cash can currently process over 100 transactions per second, with fees reliably less than a penny per transaction. The other version, which made different updates to the network kept the name Bitcoin and the original ticker symbol BTC. Bitcoin can only process between three and seven transactions per second, and is now considered by many to be digital gold instead of digital cash. Its fees have ranged anywhere from several cents to 10s of dollars per transaction, depending on the number of people trying to use the network at once

Bitcoin miners — additionally regarded as "nodes" — are the proprietors of high-speed computer systems which independently verify every transaction, and add a executed "block" of transactions to the ever-growing "chain," which has a complete, public and everlasting document of each Bitcoin transaction.

New Bitcoins are created as phase of the Bitcoin mining process, in which they are supplied as a rewarding reward to humans who function laptop structures that assist to validate transactions.

Bitcoin miners — additionally regarded as "nodes" — are the proprietors of high-speed computer systems which independently verify every transaction, and add a executed "block" of transactions to the ever-growing "chain," which has a complete, public and everlasting document of each Bitcoin transaction.

Miners are paid in Bitcoin for their efforts, which incentivizes the decentralized community to independently confirm every transaction. This unbiased community of miners additionally decreases the threat for fraud or false records to be recorded, as the majority of miners want to verify the authenticity of every block of statistics earlier than it is brought to the blockchain, in a technique acknowledged as "proof of work."