Bitcoin Explained

What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a digital currency, which no one controls, Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars – it is mined by people, running computers all around the world, using various software that solves mathematical problems.

Who Created it?
Satoshi Nakamoto who is unknown to this day created bitcoin, some say it is one person, others say it is a group. The whitepaper was produced just after the financial crash the idea was to produce a currency independent of any central authority, transferable electronically, more or less instantly, with very low transaction fees.

The Perks of Bitcoin:
Its decentralised and the network isn’t controlled by one central authority. Every computer that mines bitcoin and processes transactions makes up a part of the network. In theory, one central authority can’t manipulate bitcoin and cause a meltdown or just decide to take people’s bitcoins away from them. Look at what happened in Greece when the government decided to limit ATM withdraws or when the second largest bank in Cyprus closed causing panic but also causing financial damage to a lot of its customers. With bitcoin this would not happen. Bitcoin is transparent it stores details of every single transaction that ever happened in the network in a huge version of a general ledger, called the blockchain. It isn’t inflationary, a problem with regular fiat currency is that governments can print as much of it as they like. If there are not enough US dollars to pay off the national debt, then the Federal Reserve can simply print more. If the economy is down, then the government can take newly printed money and inject it into the economy and over time this causes the value of a currency to decrease. Bitcoin was designed with a maximum number of coins. Only 21 million will ever be created under the original specification. This means that after that, the number of bitcoins won’t grow, so inflation won’t be a problem. In fact, deflation – where the price of goods and services falls – is more likely in the bitcoin world!

The Current Issue with Bitcoin:
Transaction times! Right now it takes an average time of around 78 minutes to confirm a bitcoin transaction, according to Blockchain.com, the slow transaction times is causing huge congestion which is then driving up the price to send bitcoin! A proposed update known as the lightning network is a scale-free, low-fee solution that has the potential to solve Bitcoin's scalability problem.

What I Think of Bitcoin and its Future:
I have held bitcoin since I started in the crypto world and I will continue to do so, bitcoin has always faced issues but they have always been overcome! Bitcoin in my opinion will keep growing, and I am happy to be apart of the journey and I can't wait to see what the future holds for bitcoin!