What is Bitcoin

 

in this introductory Post you'll learn what Bitcoin is and how today's two most popular

versions of bitcoin differ from each other as its name suggests bitcoin is an

electronic currency but unlike government issued currencies

there is no single entity that issues bitcoin or is in charge of processing

its transactions before bitcoin it was not possible to make electronic payments

without the help of a third party like a bank or payment processor.

payments were often slow expensive and not available to everyone

to solve those problems bitcoin operates without a trusted third party

instead it works as a purely peer-to-peer electronic currency

meaning that payments are sent directly from one person to another

how does that work simply put computers all over the world use

mathematical functions to independently verify all bitcoin transactions which are then

added to a public permanent list of transactions called the Blockchain.

the blockchain is stored on all of those computers and works as a secure

universal record of who owns what early on in bitcoin's history there are very

few transactions being processed by the network but as time

went on more and more people started using bitcoin and so the number of

transactions to be processed went up too eventually the bitcoin network needed to

be updated to keep transactions fast cheap and reliable but because there wasn't consensus

on how this update should be performed or whether it should be implemented at all.

bitcoin ultimately had to split into two separate currencies for that update to happen

the version that implemented the originally planned update is called bitcoin cash

which is listed on exchanges using the

ticker symbol bch. bitcoin cash can currently process over 100 transactions per second

with fees reliably less than a penny per transaction the other version which made different

updates to the network kept the name bitcoin and the original ticker symbol btc

bitcoin can only process between three and seven transactions per second and is now considered by many to be digital gold instead of digital cash its fees have ranged anywhere from several cents to tens of dollars per transaction depending on the number of people trying to use the network at once.

you can get started with bitcoin or bitcoin cash today by downloading our free wallet app at wallet.bitcoin.com.