What is Bitcoin and how does it work?

Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous person or team who outlined the technology in a 2008 white paper. It’s an appealingly simple concept: bitcoin is digital money that allows for secure peer-to-peer transactions on the internet.

Bitcoin Basics

Since Bitcoin’s creation, thousands of new cryptocurrencies have been launched, but bitcoin (abbreviated as BTC) remains the largest by market capitalization and trading volume.

• Depending on your goals, bitcoin can function as

- an investment vehicle

- a store of value similar to gold

- a way to transfer value around the world

- even just a way to explore an emerging technology

How Bitcoin works

Unlike credit card networks like Visa and payment processors like Paypal, bitcoin is not owned by an individual or company. Bitcoin is the world’s first completely open payment network which anyone with an internet connection can participate in. Bitcoin was designed to be used on the internet, and doesn’t depend on banks or private companies to process transactions.

One of the most important elements of Bitcoin is the blockchain, which tracks who owns what, similar to how a bank tracks assets. What sets the Bitcoin blockchain apart from a bank's ledger is that it is decentralized, meaning anyone can view it and no single entity controls it.

Here are some details about how it all works:

• Specialized computers known as ‘mining rigs’ perform the equations required to verify and record a new transaction.?In the early days, a typical desktop PC was powerful enough to participate, which allowed pretty much anyone who was curious to try their hand at mining. These days the computers required are massive, specialized, and often owned by businesses or large numbers of individuals pooling their resources. (In October 2019, it required 12 trillion times more computing power to mine one bitcoin than it did when Nakamoto mined the first blocks in January 2009.)