Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous person or team who outlined the technology in a 2008 white paper. It's an appealingly simple concept: bitcoin is digital money that allows for secure peer-to-peer transactions on the internet. Unlike services like Venmo and PayPal, which count on the standard financial system for permission to transfer money and on existing debit/credit accounts, bitcoin is decentralized: any two different people, anywhere in the world, can send bitcoin to one another without the involvement of a bank, government, and other institution.

Every transaction involving Bitcoin is tracked on the blockchain, which is similar to a bank's ledger, or log of customers'funds moving in and from the bank. In simple terms, it is a record of each and every transaction available using bitcoin. Unlike a bank's ledger, the Bitcoin blockchain is distributed across the entire network. No enterprise, country, or third party is in control of it; and anyone may become part of that network. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. This is digital money that can't be inflated or manipulated in any way. It isn't necessary to purchase a complete bitcoin: you should buy merely a fraction of just one if that's all you need or need.

When Bitcoin first appeared, it marked an important advance in computer science, because it solved a fundamental problem of commerce on the internet: how will you transfer value between two different people with out a trusted intermediary (like a bank) in the centre? By solving that problem, the invention of bitcoin has wide-ranging ramifications: As a currency designed for the net, it provides for financial transactions that range across borders and around the planet without the involvement of banks, credit-card companies, lenders, or even governments. When any two people—wherever they may live—can send payments to one another without encountering those gatekeepers, it generates the potential for an open financial system that's more effective, more free, and more innovative. That, the bottom line is, is bitcoin explained.

Unlike credit card networks like Visa and payment processors like Paypal, bitcoin is not owned by a person or company. Bitcoin may be the world's first completely open payment network which anyone with an internet connection can participate in. Bitcoin was designed to be used on the web, and doesn't depend on banks or private companies to process transactions.

Certainly one of the most important elements of Bitcoin could be the blockchain, which tracks who owns what, similar to how a bank tracks assets. What sets the Bitcoin blockchain aside from a bank's ledger is that it's decentralized, meaning anyone can see it and not one entity controls it Crypto news flashes.

Specialized computers called ‘mining rigs'perform the equations needed to verify and record a new transaction. In the first days, an average desktop PC was powerful enough to participate, which allowed more or less anyone who was simply curious to test their hand at mining. Nowadays the computers required are massive, specialized, and often owned by businesses or many individuals pooling their resources. (In October 2019, it required 12 trillion times more computing power to mine one bitcoin than it did when Nakamoto mined the very first blocks in January 2009.)

Ethereum, which launched in 2015, is the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap after Bitcoin. But unlike Bitcoin, it wasn't intended to be digital money. Instead, Ethereum's founders attempt to build a new kind of global, decentralized computing platform that takes the security and openness of blockchains and extends those attributes to a vast range of applications.