What is bitcoin.

[admin]

What is bitcoin.
The Bitcoin Cash network will undergo a protocol upgrade as per the roadmap. Businesses and individuals who use the Bitcoin Cash network should check to ensure that their software is compatible with the upgrade.
Compatible Implementations:
Additional Information:
Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash.
Enabling new economies with low fee micro-transactions, large business transactions, and permissionless spending.
The Best Money in the World.
Bitcoin Cash brings sound money to the world, fulfilling the original promise of Bitcoin as "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash". Merchants and users are empowered with low fees and reliable confirmations. The future shines brightly with unrestricted growth, global adoption, permissionless innovation, and decentralized development.
All Bitcoin holders as of block 478558 are also owners of Bitcoin Cash. All are welcome to join the Bitcoin Cash community as we move forward in creating sound money accessible to the whole world.
The campaign has successfully achieved its initial goal of raising 800 BCH. Thank you to all the contributors to the Bitcoin Cash Development Fund. We appreciate your help in supporting the technical development of Bitcoin Cash.
Read the Whitepaper.
The original whitepaper was published on October 31, 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of the world's first cryptocurrency. The title of the Bitcoin whitepaper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Bitcoin Cash aims to continue this vision of bringing sound money to the world.
The Bitcoin Cash Roadmap.
To become a solid base for application development and innovation, Bitcoin Cash must continuously improve and compete. Working together, we can build a technical foundation to empower Bitcoin Cash to be the best money the world has ever seen.
Fast.
Transact in seconds. Get confirmed in minutes.
Reliable.
A network that runs without congestion.
Low Fees.
Send money globally for pennies.
Simple.
Easy to use. No hassles.
Stable.
A payment system that's a proven store of value.
Secure.
World's most robust blockchain technology.
Join the Bitcoin Cash community.
Getting Started.
What is peer to peer electronic cash?
1. Getting Started.
Peer to peer (P2P) electronic cash is simply described as online money sent from one person to another without the need for a trusted third-party. As described in the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, P2P cash makes use of digital signatures as part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent fraud. This makes P2P cash a trustless and safe way to transact without the need of intermediaries.
Where do I store my Bitcoin Cash?
2. Download a wallet.
Getting started with Bitcoin Cash is super easy. The first step is to download a wallet so that you can begin participating in the Bitcoin economy. Most wallets are free to download and are easy to use that have a few key features such as sending, receiving, storing funds securely, transaction lookups, and more.
How do I get Bitcoin Cash?
3. Buy or Earn Bitcoin Cash.
The two easiest ways to get Bitcoin Cash is to buy or work for it. Buying Bitcoin Cash is the most used and convenient way, where all you have to do is sign up for a Bitcoin exchange and deposit funds so you can convert it to Bitcoin Cash. The exchange will send you Bitcoin Cash after the trade has occurred.
What can I buy with Bitcoin Cash?
4. Spend Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin Cash isn’t just for speculation. It’s intended usage is a peer to peer electronic currency, which means, it should be spent. Spending Bitcoin Cash is fast, with near-instant transactions and sub-cent transaction fees, making it the most secure and widely used digital currency on the planet.
How can my business use Bitcoin Cash?
5. Accept Bitcoin Cash.
As a merchant one of your main goals is to be able to accept and process payments as quickly and seamlessly as possible so you can make your customers happy and receive payments without any headaches. Bitcoin Cash is the solution, as it has fast and low-cost transactions. As the world goes digital, electronic currencies such as Bitcoin are becoming the go-to method for paying online and in retail shops. Easily accept Bitcoin Cash directly or use third-party providers to accept Bitcoin Cash using their platforms and convert all or part of the sale into local fiat currency.

[admin]

What is Bitcoin and how does it work?
The digital-currency has plunged over 50 per cent in the past 13 trading days.
Bitcoin is talk of town these days. On one hand, Japan consider bitcoin as a legal tender, while on the other, JP Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon calls it little more than a "fraud".
Investors or traders of Bitcoin faced chaotic situation after Shanghai-based BTCChina, a major Chinese bitcoin exchange, on Thursday said it would stop trading in the crypto-currency from September 30, citing tightening regulation, while smaller bitcoin exchanges ViaBTC, YoBTC and Yunbi on Friday announced similar closures. This sent negative signal to the world in relation to Bitcoin.
Indian government also is not looking happy with Bitcoin. The Reserve Bank of India official Sudarshan Sen on September 13 said that the central bank was uncomfortable with "non-fiat" cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
The digital-currency has plunged over 50 per cent in the past 13 trading days.
What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, or a digital currency, that uses rules of cryptography for regulation and generation of units of currency. Bitcoin falls under the scope of cryptocurrency and was the first and most valuable among them. It is commonly called a decentralised digital currency.
Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.
How Bitcoin works? Hitesh Malviya, Bitcoin Expert, itsblockchain.com explains, Bitcoins are completely virtual coins designed to be 'self-contained' for their value, with no need for banks to move and store the money.
Once you own bitcoins, they possess value and trade just as if they were nuggets of gold in your pocket. You can use your bitcoins to purchase goods and services online, or you can tuck them away and hope that their value increases over the years. Bitcoins are traded from one personal 'wallet' to another.
A wallet is a small personal database that you store on your computer drive, on your smartphone, on your tablet, or somewhere in the cloud.

[admin]

What Is Bitcoin? A Quick Starter Gu data-description='Fergus is the chief editor and resident curmudgeon of Cloudwards.net. After finishing a degree in history at the University of Amsterdam he bid farewell to the cold northern climes and started a career as a newspaperman in the Far East. Realizing after a few years that online publishing is way more fun than the paper kind, he now bosses the team around over the internet and works himself into a lather on behalf of consumers everywhere. Contact him at fergus [at] cloudwards.net, though be warned that he has a very low tolerance for drivel.'>
Though normally financial news is restricted to the business pages of stuffy publications, the last few months even regular newscasters, often tripping over the unfamiliar words, have been talking about a new -- well, what is it? -- taking the world by storm: bitcoin. In this article we'll see whether we can get a little closer to what bitcoin actually is and what its future may possibly be.
However, if you're interested mostly in what it isn't, we can save you the trouble of reading onward: bitcoin is in no way, shape or form, an actual currency. Though it can be used to buy products from a number of vendors (fewer and fewer, we would like to add), the way it is traded and sold makes it more of a commodity in and of itself.
That said, we would also like to distance ourselves from the Debbie Downers who seem to think that bitcoin is the beginning of the end; though its future as a currency is in doubt, bitcoin is a herald of several exciting new developments and technologies, which is good news for everyone, as well as a way in which a handful of people have gotten very, very rich, which is good news for, well, that same handful of people.
Cryptocurrency and Blockchain.
Bitcoin is a complicated subject and picking a beginning is as hard as explaining what's going on. In this article we'll start by tackling the term cryptocurrency, which is the umbrella bitcoin falls under. Besides bitcoin, there are other digital coins like Ripple, Ethereum and Litecoin, to name but three of many.
In short, cryptocurrencies are completely digital coins that you should be able to exchange for goods and services purchased online. For example, several of our best VPN providers allow you to pay them with bitcoin and its ilk (though again, fewer and fewer), as did Steam until a few weeks ago.
The "crypto-" prefix is in this case short for "cryptography" rather than some derivation of the word "secret." This is because all cryptocurrencies rely on some form of cypher for them to exist and keep them from being duplicated or stolen.
Bitcoin has as distinction that it was the first cryptocurrency to make it big (more on its history later), but all the ones currently active have the same technological underpinnings, something called the blockchain. Going into the full ins and outs of blockchain is beyond the scope of this article, so let's keep it short and say it's basically a digital ledger that keeps track of how many units of a cryptocurrency have been traded.
This ledger is stored in such a way that old entries can't be wiped, nor can be manipulated by anyone else. It is a revolutionary new technology that has a lot of people besides bitcoin fans excited, including bankers, accountants, hedge fund managers and politicians (though this last group seems to mainly be interested in the "cheap" and "easy" descriptors and likely won't be such big fans of the fact that information can't be deleted).
The inherent security of blockchain is great not just to keep your bitcoins or what have you safe, but also for another reason: traditional currencies' creation and management is in the hands of central authorities (usually central banks). Because blockchain is so transparent, cryptocurrencies can be regulated by the people that own them.
Or at least in theory, but more on that later. Let's first take a look at the history of bitcoin and with it, pretty much all other digital coins.
Bitcoin Past.
The idea of creating a digital-only currency is as old as science fiction, with a lot of people throwing ideas around online ever since the geocities days. In fact, bitcoin is far from the very first of its kind, it's just the only one that was entirely internet-based and successful enough to make it past a few hundred users or so.
This is mainly because it was the first cryptocurrency to solve one very important riddle: what prevents cybercriminals from accessing your database and making off with your currency or, worse yet, stealing the code and basically creating as much as they want, turning your hard work into so many more worthless bits and bytes?
After all, most of the effort that goes into designing regular currency is to make sure that people can't copy it too easily, while banks, stores and even individuals spend plenty of time and money to make sure nobody steals their cash (installing safes, arranging armed transport, building firewalls for online banking, etc.).
The person who figured it out in this case was named Satoshi Nakomoto and that's pretty much all we know about him. Though there's plenty of speculation on who the man is -- he might not even be Japanese, his name notwithstanding, because, gasp, sometimes people on the internet lie! -- with some of the wilder guesses including Elon Musk of Tesla (he denied), as well as a host of crypto enthusiasts and maverick economists.
Nakomoto's big invention was a form of blockchain technology which made "double-spending" -- spending a bitcoin twice by exploiting the code -- impossible. His code also allowed users to "mine" bitcoin, or run a computer process that creates new bitcoin.
As more bitcoin are created, it requires increased processing power to make more, meaning that mining has become a very serious enterprise, indeed, especially since Nakomoto hardcoded a limit of 21 million bitcoin total into the code.
Any bitcoin added to the ledger was there to stay, and couldn't be tampered with. The bitcoins themselves were pieces of code that couldn't be copied are messed with either, meaning that Nakomoto had created a digital coin that was in some ways even safer than many of the hard currencies in use, an impressive feat.
It should maybe be noted here that once the first "block" of around one million bitcoins was mined, Nakomoto disappeared, never to be heard from again. He left it to his supporters to mine the next few million bitcoin and then things really took off. Currently Nakomoto, whoever he is, is sitting on a pile worth billions.
Bitcoin Present.
Nakomoto finished mining the first block of bitcoin in January 2009. Below we have a graph that shows the increase in price of bitcoin on the open marketplace, starting in early 2009 until mid 2017 (we'll have the figures for the truly meteoric rise that propelled bitcoin into a household term a few paragraphs down).
As you can see, the first two years pretty much nothing happened. Bitcoin was mostly seen as a hobby by many, with only a few people taking it seriously. This group were mainly privacy advocates, who saw in bitcoin a way in which to snip the last bit of identifiable information away from you.
Since in the end people need to pay for things on the internet, many purchases can easily be traced back to you by checking your payment information, usually your credit card or other banking info. Bitcoin was the first safe, anonymous payment method around and a few people could see ahead into the future, realizing it would be a great hit.
The price of bitcoin barely covered the cost of mining it (you need some pretty serious hardware for it, not to mention the cost of electricity) until late 2013, when it started seeing a small raise in price. This is despite bitcoin already having become infamous as the oil that greased the engine of the Silk Road, the illegal marketplace that flourished from 2011 until it was shut down by the FBI in 2013.
It's always hard to say why the price of a commodity goes up or down. Though there are plenty of general laws of economic that tell us when something should happen, none of them mean it will happen. In the case of bitcoin, the price going up seems to have been a combination of fame, interest and a bright future as the currency of the internet.
Higher and Higher.
That said, the vagaries of bitcoin are fairly spectacular: starting out worth less than a penny, bitcoin in late 2013 hit a high of $1,242, only to tumble once again, bounce once or twice, to settle down in the $400 to $600 range for the last five months of 2016. Then, when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2017, the real fun began.

[admin]

The above graph only shows the cryptocurrency's price from August onward, but it's basically the most interesting six months in any commodity's history. Bitcoin was gained ground for the first six months of 2017 until it was at around $4,400 at the start of August; after that it starting going all over the place, first with a massive drop from five grand to just over half that in September, then the insane price increases that have had everyone talking.
Bitcoin climbed so rapidly over the course of just a few months -- from that slump of just over $2,000 to highs of over $20,000 -- that many commentators invoked tulipmania, a social hysteria that crept over the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, when people bought and sold tulip bulbs for insane prices.
Eventually that bubble, based as it was on highly perishable goods, burst and dragged the entire economy, one of the world's strongest at the time, with it. It was one of the worst economic crisis of early modern history and has stood as a lesson in the centuries since.
However, the bitcoin bubble isn't set to burst yet, despite several nasty tumbles it took: many, including this author, thought the party was over a few days before Christmas when bitcoin fell from $20,000 to under $15,000, but miraculously it repaired itself and heralded in the new year at an almost entirely recovered price.
Bitcoin Future.
However, markets are unpredictable and we've already had several scares in 2018, and the year's not even two weeks old at time of writing. Right now it's below the $14,000 mark, though by the time you're reading this it could be far higher or lower than that.
Though this volatility could be great news for people who bought in at the beginning -- they have nothing to lose, after all -- or who have a couple of million bucks to throw at the problem, there is a fear that plenty of guys dreaming of a big score might get suckered in.
Now, speculating on a commodity is something you do on your own lookout, of course, our aim is more to provide a counterweight to the sky-is-the-limit crowd that seems to have sprung up almost overnight, some of them claiming bitcoin could hit a million. While that may be, events from the last decade should teach us that the price of an investment can fall as well as plummet, so always avoid investing money you can't afford to lose.
Besides the specter of investors getting wiped out should bitcoin crash -- and some of those investors are big enough the economy as a whole could feel the bump -- this massive rise in bitcoin's value has an interesting side effect, namely that it's attractiveness as a currency has lessened.
Bitcoin is fluctuating so badly currently that it's almost impossible to set a price on any commodity or service without it being outdated just an hour or two later. Though this may seem attractive at first, as a seller this can also work against you if the currency in question has lost a quarter of its value in just a day's time (there's also the matter of high handling fees for bitcoin).
As we said earlier, Steam has stopped taking payment in bitcoin, as have several other vendors. Though it's unclear what kind of reduction there is across the board -- before the madness started thousands of stores both digital and physical accepted bitcoin -- there seems to be a consensus that for now at least bitcoin's role as money may be played out.
Bitcoin and Politics.
Another important change this year is that now some countries are turning against bitcoin, often because they are worried that rampant speculation may destabilize their own economies, sometimes just because they don't like the whole "anonymity" thing (looking at you, China).
Right now the Middle Kingdom as well as South Korea are taking action against all cryptocurrencies, including a ban on initial coin offerings (ICO, the way in which companies try and raise money by releasing their own cryptocurrency), with rumors swirling that other countries are contemplating much the same measures.
Again, reading tea leaves is a dangerous hobby, but there's no denying we're moving into interesting times when it comes to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
Conclusion.
On which note we'll end this article, as really all we can do from this point is read tea leaves, which isn't what journalists are supposed to do. Whatever actually happens with bitcoin, cryptocurrencies are definitely here to stay, as is the blockchain technology with which they were created.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest on new releases and more.
In fact, no matter what you think of cryptocurrencies, you can't deny that blockchain is a real game changer which will alter the way in which we not only store money, but also data. Though none of our best cloud storage providers are as yet using this new tech in their solutions, that day may not be far off.
Among our best online backup providers, however, Acronis has gone so far as to implement blockchain technology, read more about one product in our Acronis True Image review. You can also directly backup bitcoin, read our linked guide for more on that.
What do you think of cryptocurrencies? Are you a bitcoin investor, or do you prefer to put your money elsewhere? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.

[admin]

What is Bitcoin (BTC)?
Beginner.
What you will learn.
Bitcoin is the world's first peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. It was invented by a mysterious inventor Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and is regarded as the first digital currency to fix the double spend problem.
Bitcoin is what started it all. It was the first cryptocurrency to crack some of the fundamentals of creating digital money that can't be copied like normal files. But who invented it, and why was it so important? We'll explore this and more below.
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. What does that mean? It's a new way to pay for goods and services, as well as store value online that doesn't rely on a centralized bank, government or credit provider to do so.
Built using blockchain, a fundamentally new way to transfer data and value over the internet, everything from sandwiches to houses can be bought using Bitcoin.
D >The first official purchase using Bitcoin was for pizza in May 2010. Two Papa John's Pizzas were exchanged for 10,000 BTC. May 22 is now celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Who invented Bitcoin?
No one really knows for sure. But the person, or persons most directly responsible refers to him/her/themselves as Satoshi Nakamoto.
The inventor, or inventors go by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, a mysterious character (or characters) that many have tried to find, some more successfully than others.
A brief history.
In November 2008, a paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was published on a small mailing list for cryptography fans. The author went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto and he/she/they explained how the currency would work.
A few months later, in January 2009, the software to create the currency was released, followed shortly by the first ever block to be mined on the network. This is typically referred to as the Genesis block .
The first identifiable person to get involved in Bitcoin was a programmer called Hal Finney, who downloaded the software needed to run it and received 10 bitcoin, making it the first ever bitcoin transaction, which took place on Janaury 12, 2009.
For a while, Satoshi Nakamoto and a few others mined currency on the network (read more about how mining works in our guide on mining) before mysteriously disappearing, handing over control to another programmer called Gavin Andresen.
What was so special about it?
Bitcoin did something that no one had been able to do before. It was:
Decentralized - no-one person or group owned or controlled it. Trustless (peer-to-peer) - No more third parties were needed to conduct transactions. Borderless - money could be moved easily across the world without the need for exchanges. Immutabile - It can never be changed or reversed unlike today's financial systems. Prevented double-spending - it solved the problem many digital currencies had tried to crack before but failed to do so. It was the first proof-of-concept for a blockchain in action.
D > Around 25% of all Bitcoins have been lost. In November 13, an IT consultant accidentally threw away a hard drive with the private keys to 7,500 Bitcoins. That loss is worth somewhere between $15-$20 million today. Whoops.
How is Bitcoin produced?
Imagine gold under the ground. We know it's there, but its value is hidden until a miner 'digs' it up. In the Bitcoin world, a miner discovers Bitcoin by creating 'blocks' of all the transactions going on in the network and adds them to the blockchain.
Want to know more about mining? Check out our guide to mining.
In Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper, he/she/they designated that there could only be 21 million bitcoins in existence - but not all have been unearthed yet. At the current rate of mining, all of them will be 'dug up' sometime in 2140.
How do you get hold of Bitcoins?
There are three main ways of getting hold of it:
You can buy them using fiat currencies ($, £ of € for example) at exchanges. You'll need a wallet and a set of keys to store and exchange them. You can become a miner and try to work out the secret puzzle for the current block, which will reward you with 12.5 BTC. You can win them! Gambling sites have popped up to help people spend and earn their Bitcoin.
D > Around 1,000 people own nearly 40% of all Bitcoins currently in circulation.
What can you do with Bitcoin?
Buy things - everything from a Tesla, a house, a hol >
D >In 2013, the FBI made $48 million by selling 144,000 Bitcoins it had seized from criminals using the currency.
What is a Bitcoin wallet?
Like a regular wallet, it's a place to keep your valuables. When it comes to Bitcoin, those valuables are your keys held on a piece of software you can store on your phone, the web or a computer.
In order to buy and sell Bitcoin you need a private and a public key.
A public key is what you share with people to trade it.
Your private key is something you keep to yourself. When you trade, you send someone your public key, and your private key is used to authenticate that it's you who is requesting to send or receive Bitcoin.
Find out more about wallets in our handy guide.
D > Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. So much so that one transaction consumes nearly 4,000 times the energy used when processing a credit card transaction.
The Future.
We know that all Bitcoins will be mined sometime in 2140. In the meantime, the future of Bitcoin and its value is uncertain.
The limitations of the cryptocurrency - has lead to the creation of dozens of other altcoins that are more specialized. We've done a whole article on it's limits.
There are some that argue it could become a store of value, like gold is in the real world. Others meanwhile, want to keep it as a way to buy goods and services and developers - find out more about that by reading our piece on the Lightning Network.
Bitcoin's future is uncertain. However, blockchain's potential is just getting started.

[admin]

What is Bitcoin?
Everyone's talking about Bitcoin. Here's what it is and why it's important.
Bitcoin. It's a word that was once merely discussed as an academic idea among technology enthusiasts, then became a hushed mention among law enforcement tackling online drug trades -- and most recently it was craze for those looking to make a quick buck. But what is Bitcoin? Why are people so interested in it?
A Guide to Bitcoin.
How to buy Bitcoin How to sell Bitcoin How to mine Bitcoin What is blockchain? People buy Bitcoin for all sorts of different reasons. It's a store of value, a transactional medium, and an idea that some claim could change the future of economics entirely.
Most notably, it's not a real, physical thing, but an entirely digital entity (no matter what the header image may suggest) with no middle-man controlling its use. To put it simply, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.
A crypto-what?
A cryptocurrency, of which Bitcoin was the first and still the foremost, is an entirely digital form of currency. Think of it like the way you operate your online bank account or use credit cards. You never have to physically have that money to own it or use it. The same is true with Bitcoin -- it's just numbers in a