What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a decentralized virtual currency that has gained great value in recent years.
It is a currency because with Bitcoin you can purchase goods and services and make payments quickly and safely.
It is virtual, because it is only in the blockchain network, you cannot have a physical bitcoin coin, you cannot have a bitcoin bill in your hands, (That physical coin and that bill have no value) because bitcoin is only on the internet, inside of the blockchain network.
And it is Decentralized because nobody controls it, it is not like the dollar, the euro or any fiat currency, which are controlled and issued by centralized governments and central banks.
Bitcoin is controlled by the community thanks to the blockchain.
Bitcoin has revolutionized the financial world. Not just companies and investors, but even countries. Some, like El Salvador, are in its favor and use it as legal tender. Others, like China, are against it and apply strict regulations to limit its use.
Origin of bitcoin
Cryptocurrency was born in 2009, when someone with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto emailed an article to experts in cryptography and digital code. In it, he described the characteristics of this digital money and attached a code with which to carry out the so-called 'mining' of this virtual currency, the process to validate and carry out the transactions. Still today, Nakamoto's identity and whether he is a single person or a group of them is unknown.
The idea of having a safe currency outside the system and the control of the banks caused a furore. More and more people adopted it to make transactions, and little by little it became popular.
How does Bitcoin work?
Bitcoin is born and lives in the blockchain (chain of blocks). And what is the blockchain? It is difficult to offer a simple explanation, so let's take an example instead.
Imagine that the Internet is a school playground. There, the children exchange stamps, food or toys, but all transactions are carried out under the control of the teacher, who keeps a commission.
One day, the children decide to 'decentralize' their exchanges, and create a common and transparent account book. This book is made up of identical blocks or nodes, where the exchange information is updated automatically, and each child has access to one of them.
They cannot be manipulated or falsified, and a central authority is no longer necessary.
Simplifying, the blockchain is a public, transparent, secure database that is in the hands of all users who want to use it to exchange information, goods or services.
“This is what makes it so safe, because the only way for these types of operations to be credited is for all of us to have the same copies,” says Maximiliano Hinz, head of operations at Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange platform.
Virtual currencies have prospered thanks to this blockchain system, and Bitcoin is the one with the highest value and the one with the highest adoption. It is the first use case of blockchain technology globally, and it is “super secure, there has never been a case of duplicate operations on the blockchain,” says Hinz.