Thirteen years ago a pseudonymous person by the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper describing a new system of crypto currency called bitcoin on bitpapa. At that time most people and cryptographers themselves were sceptical about the idea of bitcoin. In the past cryptographers and developers had tried to develop an electronic form of cash but all of them had failed for variety of reasons. For instance when you pay at a shop using a bank card, the shop checks with the bank to see if you have money to make the purchase, then the bank checks its records – verifies it has enough money and then deducts that amount from your card, consequently updating its records and takes the fee for providing their services. If you wanted to remove banks from this system, which would you trust to keep the records straight without altering or cheating.
No one would ever trust a single person with that much power but you may give your trust to a collective group of people in millions. The main idea is to not have a centralised record of transactions but instead many copies of those transactions are distributed across the world. Every owner of each copy records every transaction. Under this new model the shop instead of checking with the bank checks with everyone’s records to see if you have the money and when the purchase is made the record keepers update their records. If an individual’s transaction record is fraudulent it doesn’t agree with rest of the copies of transaction records thus gets rejected.
Blockchain network
This large collective group of people checking record transactions aren’t people at all but a network of computers forming a Blockchain network. This practise nullifies the need of third party or intermediaries such as Banks themselves because the decentralised network like https://bitpapa.com/keeps itself in check. Amazingly this means no bans, no server shutdowns or blocking of payments therefore transactions in bitcoin can never be stopped or regulated although it can be tracked.
So called miners keep the network running by solving complex equations on their computers by mining bitcoin in chunks called block which contains all of the recent transactions. Blocks are kind of like a page in a record keeping book, the miners receive payment in bitcoin for their effort much like mining gold. Also like gold there is finite supply of bitcoin to stop it from being devalued much like we are currently witnessing in fiat currency. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin and the final bitcoin will be mined in 2140. Bitcoin’s value in reality is just worth what someone’s willing to pay for it. If confidence is lost, bitcoin’s value can possibly dropped to zero but regardless it is an intriguing idea. There is an argument to be made that the value of bitcoin is actually the trust and utility of the blockchain network itself.
Conclusion:
The concept of cryptocurrencies is indeed very fascinating, technologies in the form of metaverse and other blockchain technologies are considered to be the future but the only major issue that revolves around the Cryptocurrency: The era of Digital Currency is the legality of this digital asset.
