When nobody believed it, a virtual currency was born in 2012 that was worth a few Euros. In 2013 it was worth over 1000 Euros. But 2017 is the year of the fast, when it reached 10 thousand Euros and increasing its value exponentially day by day.
This is the story of Bitcoin, crypto currency with a few years of life, but with great potential, something absolutely innovative, not regulated by banks, but which affects the economy in an important way. A real revolutionary invention that, if this growth trend continues, will put the economic system as we know it at risk, forcing a total rethinking of the concept of money and economic exchange.
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a virtual currency, or cryptocurrency, which money, in the classical sense, is not, which is controlled and exchanged completely and exclusively by computers and servers on the Internet. It is an anonymous (because encrypted) and public service, totally transparent to the system. Bitcoin exists in a virtual dimension in which the peer-to-peer logic is strongly rooted, in which the absolute absence of intermediaries in the exchange of information and money is assumed, in this case. This is the reason why the extra-Internet world looks on Bitcoin with fear, since it is a revolution capable of undermining a secular system.
Why is so greatly talked about nowadays? Because Bitcoin now claims to become the first cryptocurrency recognized, traded and valued globally, more than legitimate claim to judge by the extraordinary results of the first years. To know more about effect of corona on bitcoin.
The Origins
In 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto , a programmer, launched this virtual currency (officially released on January 3, 2009) with the aim of distributing it as if it were software to be installed on a number of machines, from which other people could use it remotely. To get to these miners, it is necessary to create a value (which in this case is an address) that is arbitrarily assigned by people for the exchange of a concrete asset. After the first Bitcoins, the exchanges themselves have built a more or less high value, according to the basic logic of the economy, which, however, are out of the control of monetary reserves, although they can be converted.
Bitcoin is a real agreement between those who use it. Here lies the biggest revolution compared to the traditional real currency. A nominal value is assigned to something of little value to be used for the money transaction between the payer and the receiver.
Miner
The functioning of the Bitcoin system depends on two basic elements: the “miner” and the “wallet”. Miner is the term used to indicate a calculator that verifies and ensures that an operation has been carried out correctly. If at the beginning a computer was enough to perform this role, today the computing powers are always higher (5 quintillion operations per second in the world), so a group of professionals has been created to manage this task. You can always use a single computer as a miner, but the maintenance cost is not convenient. Payments, collections, traceability of Bitcoins are all operations carried out in miners, which represent the real infrastructure of the cryptocurrency: it is the bank of Bitcoins.
Wallet, on the other hand, is the program that allows you to enter the Bitcoin network, where there are addresses and keys to carry out economic transactions. The wallet is like a personal bank for Bitcoin, which can be a Smartphone app for small payments with QR Code, a web service, or a software that allows offline management.
How does it work?
Bitcoins can be used only if in possession of a decryption key, obtained in wallets. Each transaction is filed in a “block chain”, a register that serves to verify that the entire procedure was successful and that the transited value was actually owned first and then deposited.
Thanks to a personal key, Bitcoins can be spent, since they lead to the address where a transaction can be made. To send a Bitcoin or receive it, it is necessary that the key and address coincide and “know” each other.