What is Bitcoin(BTC)?

By Francisco Borges | MundoCrypto | 20 Feb 2021

If you are already spend some time on Publish0x this post ins't meant for you.

If you new to the cryptocurrency world, I will try to introduce the simplest way to the most well known cryptocurrency of the moment BITCOIN.

Introduction:

Bitcoin was created in 2009 by an person that self-styled Satoshi Nakamoto.

Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is open-source; its design is public, nobody owns or controls Bitcoin and everyone can take part.

How i can store bitcoin?

In this topic we need to dig further and understand how a Wallet works? So how does an wallet work?

In the cryptocurrency world if you want to receive or give bitcoin you need to give you wallet address. There isn't equal wallets addresses, all wallet addresses are different. How does a wallet address looks like?

This is the supposedly the wallet address of Satoshi Nakamoto, 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa. We can see that the wallets addresses use numbers, upper and lower case to generate them. However the wallet address doesn't give the real identity of the owner, which is why the blockchain is referred to as “pseudonymous”. If you want to understand better how wallets work you can check my Post about that topic.

Once you have an wallet setted you can give and receive bitcoin as you want.

What are fees?

Long story short fees is what you pay for miners to validate your transactions. Every transaction must be added to the blockchain.
Usually if you pay higher fees to send your bitcoin your transaction will be process faster(But this doesn't mean if you pay lesser for fees that your bitcoins will not be sent).
Different wallets could have different fees that you can pay or even you could choose the fee that you want to pay.

What is mining?

Previously we said that miners are reward by validating the transactions into blocks to blockchain. Thats the basic understand of what mining is.

You can mine by yourself by having some GPU's into a grid like this:

image is from here.

When you got one of these you should have in consideration the price of electricity in your city and some other things. You normally will connect to a pool of mining and then you are ready for mining.

Or you could have an Antminer that is an device already ready for mining crypto you just need to connect to power,to electricity and you are pretty ready to go. An antminer should lool like this:

image is from here.

(Before you start having some ideas for starting mine I advise you to do your own research about the subject, the porpuse of this post its to introduce you to crypto and bitcoin more specifically)

The anonymity of bitcoin

According to bitcoin.org , bitcoin is not anonymous, but is certainly more anonymous than usual banks. But why it is not anonymous?

As we mentioned before, all transactions are stored in blockchain by blocks this happens so everyone can now were all the bitcoins are and this is one of the pillars for the important decentralization of bitcoin.

But there is a negative point when you do a transaction

the identity of the user behind an address remains unknown until information is revealed during a purchase or in other circumstances.

Bitcoin.org even advise to only use one a bitcoin address once.

If you want to get deeper in this topic you can check the bitcoin.org about privacy, if you are new its a must read! LINK

How i can buy bitcoin?

After you get a little understand of what is bitcoin and i hope you did a little more research about the topic comes an interest question.

But i don't want to mine bitcoin, how i can get hands on bitcoin?

If you don't have interest in mining(that is a lot of people in crypto community), you can also invest in crypto.

You can invest in crypto by different reasons, by believing that bitcoin is the coin of the future or that you can make some bucks while bitcoin is being known by the big population, and many more reasons.

If you want to invest its pretty easy, you just need a wallet and a credit card. There is some ways to buy bitcoin:

You can buy them from bitcoin.org by here.
You can by in exchanges. Here is a list of the most popular:
- Coinbase;
- Binance;
- Kraken;
- Bitbuy;
- Gemini;
- Crypto.com;
- and many more;
By cash in bitcoinATM that you can check here.
In some wallets you can buy derectly from the wallet so you avoid pay the fees to transact from the exchange wallet to the wallet that you are keeping the bicoins: