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You do not have to talk to anyone to get a bitcoin account. Unlike most financial services, bitcoin is a protocol, not a company. You can create a new bitcoin address, or the bitcoin equivalent of an account, by writing the software yourself on your own computer.
If you are not an engineer or would rather not write your own bitcoin software, you can also run open-source software written by other people. If you do not want to run software at all, then you can talk to companies that provide bitcoin services to help. Just send half a bitcoin. Or one tenth of a bitcoin. Or one hundredth of a bitcoin. Bitcoin is divisible down to one hundred millionth of a bitcoin, or 0. First of all, bitcoin is not encrypted.
Bitcoin uses public key cryptography for digital signatures and hash functions proof-of-work, but does not use encryption for anything. In order to pay someone with bitcoin, you use your private keys to sign a transaction to them. In order to mine bitcoin, you compute hash functions to find proof-of-work hashes. At no point must you encrypt anything. You may choose to encrypt your private keys, but that is not necessary and is not a part of the bitcoin protocol.
A blockchain is a history of all transactions, but a ledger is just a record of the current balance of every address. The bitcoin blockchain has more information than the bitcoin ledger. For instance, the ledger may say that Alice has 5 bitcoins, but does not say who gave her 5 bitcoins, or that she got the bitcoins in one transaction of 3 bitcoins and one transaction of 2 bitcoins.
The blockchain, however, does contain the information that Alice received 3 bitcoins from Bob and 2 bitcoins from Susie. The ledger can be computed from the blockchain. The blockchain cannot be computed from the ledger. You can exchange bitcoin for fiat currencies by using an exchange like Coinbase, BTCChina, Unocoin, Bitstamp, and others , or by trading directly with someone that has bitcoin or wants some. There is no company that fixes the price of bitcoin.
The price is determined by a market based on supply and demand. Also, bitcoin is not any less real than the US dollar or other fiat currencies. Bitcoin is not backed by gold, nor are fiat currencies. Fiat currencies stopped being backed by gold in No, bitcoin is very secure. The market cap has been over a billion US dollars since , so if bitcoin were insecure, someone would have hacked it by now to get a billion dollar bounty.
There are many companies and enthusiasts working on bitcoin to make sure it continues to be secure. There are companies and individuals who have been hacked and had their bitcoins stolen, but that is not due to a flaw in bitcoin, rather a flaw in the security practices of those companies or individuals.
Bitcoin is limited in supply to 21 million. Although miners get new bitcoins every block, the amount of new bitcoins per block decreases every four years. At first, miners got 50 bitcoins per block, and then it decreased to 25 bitcoins, and it will keep decreasing by half every four years until ultimately it decreases to zero bitcoins, reaching a total quantity of just under 21 million.
The rate of new blocks is limited so that a new block occurs approximately once every ten minutes. As miners add computational power, the difficulty of mining a block adjusts, so that it always takes about ten minutes to mine a new block. It is not possible to mine more than 21 million bitcoins by adding more mining power.
No, bitcoin uses energy for security. It is not wasteful. Miners use energy to compute proof-of-work hashes for each block. The fact that it requires real-world energy to produce a block is also why it requires real-world energy to reverse bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin has irreversible transactions because it is expensive to compute proof-of-work hashes. Also note that the traditional financial system has large costs around security as well, including human capital and physical security.
Although hard to quantity, those costs are probably higher than the highly efficient computing hardware of bitcoin miners. It would be very difficult for a government to shut down bitcoin. If the bitcoin miners are counted as a single supercomputer, they are more powerful than the next most powerful supercomputer by many orders of magnitude. The only way to shut down bitcoin would be to spend a huge amount of capital on bitcoin miners to reverse bitcoin transactions.
But if a government did that, they would probably find it was more profitable to mine bitcoin rather than destroy it. The worst thing a government could do would be to make it illegal within their borders, but it would still be legal in other territories. And besides, there is no reason for a government to shut down bitcoin. That will almost certainly never happen, so long as there is not a bug in your bitcoin wallet software.
In preparing this list I wrote down 39 commonly asked questions about bitcoin and isolated the top 10 most frequently asked or conceptually important. This article was originally published on Ryan X. Who do I have to talk to get a bitcoin account?
How can I exchange bitcoin for real money? What if you and I have the same private key?