The Complete Front End Development Course

Chances are you hear the phrase “bitcoin mining” and your mind begins to wander to the Western fantasy of pickaxes, dirt, and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isn’t too far off. Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems (read: so complex that they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work required by a computer to solve one of these problems is the equivalent of a miner striking gold in the ground — while digging in a sandbox. At the time of writing, the odds of a computer solving one of these problems is 1 in 6 trillion, but more on that later. The result of “bitcoin mining” is twofold. First, when computers solve these complex math problems on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational math problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin paym...

So you’ve learned the basics about bitcoin, you’re excited about the potential and now you want to buy some*. But how? (*Please, never invest more than you can afford to lose – cryptocurrencies are volatile and the price could go down as well as up.) Bitcoin can be bought on exchanges, or directly from other people via marketplaces. You can pay for them in a variety of ways, ranging from hard cash to credit and debit cards to wire transfers, or even with other cryptocurrencies, depending on who you are buying them from and where you live. 1 – set up a wallet The first step is to set up a wallet to store your bitcoin – you will need one, whatever your preferred method of purchase. This could be an online wallet (either part of an exchange platform, or via an independent provider), a desktop wallet, a mobile wallet or an offline one (such as a hardware device or a paper wallet). Even within these categories of wallets there is a wide variety of services ...

To cut through some of the confusion surrounding bitcoin, we need to separate it into two components. On the one hand, you have bitcoin-the-token, a snippet of code that represents ownership of a digital concept – sort of like a virtual IOU. On the other hand, you have bitcoin-the-protocol, a distributed network that maintains a ledger of balances of bitcoin-the-token. Both are referred to as “bitcoin.” The system enables payments to be sent between users without passing through a central authority, such as a bank or payment gateway. It is created and held electronically. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by computers all around the world, using free software. It was the first example of what we today call cryptocurrencies, a growing asset class that shares some characteristics of traditional currencies, with verification based on cryptography. Who created it? A pseudonymous software developer going by the name of Satoshi Naka...