Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, meaning that it’s not issued by any central authority. Unlike most currencies, its value isn’t based on the national economy and policies of any given country. It’s valued only by what people are willing to pay for it and how many others are willing to buy it from them. The system used to create and manage Bitcoin is called the blockchain. It’s a completely transparent public ledger of every transaction ever made, a complete history of every coin that’s ever been created. Some blockchains, including Bitcoin, are maintained by a group of people acting as auditors; others are maintained only by software running on the computers making up the network.
The fact that Bitcoin is fully transparent creates a huge potential for abuse. A currency that anyone can publish at any time and anyone can verify gives rise to a whole new class of crimes. In the past, we’ve relied on trusted central authorities, including banks, governments, and credit card companies, to verify transactions. Once someone had your credit card information, they still needed you to approve every charge manually. They also had to deal with banks marking purchases as fraudulent and would try to fight it in court.
Why does the price of Bitcoin keep rising?
Bitcoin has no single central authority. Every transaction is peer-to-peer, so all transactions can be immediately verified by other nodes in the network. If someone tries to spend coins they don’t own or that have already been spent, their peers will immediately reject that transaction and refuse to record it on the blockchain. Even if they were somehow able to get a fraudulent transaction recorded, there is nobody they can sue to reverse it. Bitcoin’s security model is known as a system of “trustless verification,” and it’s not ‘trust’ in a human or a company but rather in the network itself. The only way to spend money someone else has authorized you is to have that person digitally sign it.
How does Bitcoin ‘work’?
There are several kinds of transactions possible in Bitcoin, including sending money to another person, spending digital currency on goods and services, and buying back your Bitcoin from someone else. To make any of these work, you need to know a system of encryption called public key cryptography. You can use this system to create a very long number that is hard to guess but easy for you to remember. That number is the public key, and only you know it. It’s like a password but much longer and hard to guess. It’s used to encrypt the message that accompanies all other transactions. Only someone with a private key can decrypt it and use your money. The private key is the only thing that makes an individual transaction possible and secure. This is why Bitcoin wallets often have a ‘private key’ string of letters and numbers in them somewhere, along with an image of a lock.
Buying and selling bitcoin has its drawbacks:
Its price is very unpredictable, many sellers will not accept the risk of chargeback, and there are some exchanges that are still vulnerable to hacking. In response to these problems, there have recently been a number of companies working on creating platforms similar to ‘exchanges’ but with a few key differences. One such difference is that every transaction can be verified by anyone running the software, not just the owners of the exchange. Another is that they don’t hold everyone’s money in a central account. Instead, they effectively keep track of accounts using a system of mutual credit. A third is that they use a ‘smart contract’ feature of the underlying technology to ensure that there can be no disputes about whether someone’s account balance is the same as their balance in the exchange’s records. The world is changing fast and if you want to be on the cutting edge, then it’s time for some AI trading robot. Quantum AI can teach your investments how to best invest money in order to generate big returns with little risk!
Bitcoin is not anonymous.
The anonymity of Bitcoin is only really possible because the blockchain is fully transparent. Every transaction that’s ever been made can be found somewhere in the history of the network. If you’re using a web wallet like Blockchain or Coinbase, you’ll probably see that it stores every single transaction we’ve ever made since we started using it. So if someone knows your password, they can even make a complete copy of your entire account and start making transactions from there. The same applies to a master password you may use to decrypt multiple accounts. The odds of someone guessing it are smaller, but if you have a lot of online accounts, it’s still not impossible.
Why is Bitcoin More Threatening than a Traditional Bank?
The first thing to understand is that a lot of people think of banks as parties that offer loans. In reality, a bank is much more than that. They are also the guarantor of your account’s balance and the party who has to pay for almost all sorts of fees you incur (like payment card fees). On top, banks have many quasi-legal powers to authorize payments or reject transactions, or even freeze accounts.
A Bitcoin bank account is immediately compatible with Bitcoin in all ways. You can have a single account or multiple ones. You can also have accounts at other banks, but you don’t need to rely on them for any of your transactions. When someone wants to transfer money from one account to another, the transaction can be processed immediately and goes directly from one party’s account at the other bank to their own. Once it reaches its destination, it may be verified as valid by the other party’s bank.
Conclusion:
Bitcoin is a powerful tool that has already been shown to be useful in the finance industry. Its unique security model, highly transparent transaction ledger, and ease of use have made it extremely attractive to people working in finance. Its privacy is a somewhat controversial issue, but that is true for any online account. Despite being controversial, it has also been used by a number of major financial institutions to improve their services and provide better products for their customers. Its growth in the past five years is one of the strongest examples of how disruptive technologies can affect an existing industry and prove revolutionary to it.
