Gadgetory

when a large number of people are making huge profits from their relatively small investments heads turn in this case the drama is even greater because people around the world are making money off of another obscure form of money Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin let's start with what it is bitcoin is a digital currency it's completely intangible so unlike dollars there aren't any bills or coins and Bitcoin transactions happen digitally anonymously and without the help of any banks or middlemen you can already use it to book hotels shop online in some restaurants like Subway even accept Bitcoin so you're probably wondering how Bitcoin gets printed or how you could send a Bitcoin without the help of a bank for this you can think blockchain technology let's talk about the blockchain when you venmo your friends there's a bank to oversee approve and log that transaction the bank acts like a middleman that we've all entrusted to supervise our money bing's can also charge you fees freeze your account and they can also be vulnerable to major data breaches that just doesn't exist with Bitcoin instead bitcoin uses blockchain technology it's what allows us to cut out that middleman and send money directly to each other so instead of a bank monitoring every transaction a network of computers are verifying every transaction kind of like the way thousands of people monitor any given Wikipedia page to ensure its accuracy back to the blockchain with block chain every new transaction comes in the form of a block that's permanently linked to the one before it and it's connected to the next one and so on so if a bad actor tried to tamper with one of these blocks it could destroy the entire chain and many computers on the network think about those Wikipedia editors would notice that something went wrong and here's where Bitcoin mining comes in lots of computers are working to maintain this network approve transactions and hold the network accountable without the help of a middle like a bank it takes a lot of computing energy to maintain this network of transactions and records so the network rewards the people to help keep it running those are the Bitcoin miners so when a computer helps maintain the Bitcoin network it receives a Bitcoin in return but there isn't an unlimited supply of Bitcoin instead the Bitcoin rule book states that there are just 21 million bitcoins a labelled and in part it's that scarcity that drives the value of Bitcoin it's easy to get caught up in the excitement over Bitcoin but the real innovation here is with blockchain technology it can be used for so much more than just verifying Bitcoin transactions and other cryptocurrencies think about how we could cut out middlemen in many industries and use it to verify health records legal documents and private securities Bitcoin is really just the beginning