Thursday, February 8, 2018

CRYPTOCURRENCY

February 08, 2018

BITCOIN: A BLOCKCHAIN CRYPTOCURRENCY

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency built on blockchain distributed ledger technology. Bitcoin is a peer to peer electronic cash made possible by a decentralized database. It acts as public accounting system layered on a distributed network for all to nodes to witness and users to verify. Bitcoin was the first ever true electronic value transfer of a currency in the world's history.

It is being called a better-than-gold equivalent store of value and a medium of exchange to rival Visa, Mastercard and Paypal. Its unit of account and predetermined characteristics of a finite supply (21 Million total bitcoin in circulation to avoid inflation) make bitcoin a trustless, permissionless and (will be) frictionless new world currency. It is uncensurable and unconfiscatable with high-fungibility. It is the programmable money paradigm that requires no third party intermediaries or centralized governance for all users to agree and accept terms of using it collectively.

What Is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a technology – its digital money backed by blockchain DLT – a robust international network of payments and transactional/mercantile exchanges that are completely decentralized and relies on community consensus voting mechanism for the longest/honest chain. It doesn’t depend on banks or governments to operate and its creator Satoshi Nakamoto is a group of ghosts. Bitcoin is virtual money that can be sent from any place in the world to another, instantaneously, securely and for minimal to no fees (almost like an email or instant message of today).

Bitcoin breathed new life into trying times amidst real estate housing bubble and fractional lending credit debacle and came into existence in October 2008 after the publication of a whitepaper titled, “Bitcoin: A Peer To Peer Electronic Cash System” (created by the author under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto).

Satoshi combined the knowledge of prior digital currency developments (see the Nakamoto Institute) such as HashCash and B Money and finally got all the pieces to the puzzle to fit. It was the first to succeed where these others failed to engineer a practical, autonomous decentralized peer to peer cryptocurrency that requires no central authority for money emission, validation of transactions or settlements.

The main innovation in Satoshi’s Bitcoin invention is the development of a distributed computational hashing system known as the “proof-of-work algorithm”. It conducts global transaction validations every 10 minutes, allowing the decentralized network technology to come to consensus agreement about the state of each transaction and whether the funds are valid and should be confirmed for being locked into the next block created.

The invention of Bitcoin represents the pinnacle of years of research in distributed systems and cryptography, it’s development combines 4 key innovations that make the existence of Bitcoin possible: