I just don't get it. I'vea read numerous articles trying to learn, but they only discuss how it is being used, not what it is backed by or inherent value, or how it is increasing in value so rapidly. Isn't this concept the classic definition of a ponzi scheme, or am I missing something here?
overhype, so the people who get there first can jump out and leave the late buyers in the dust i don't like it i stick to physical value. Plenty of bitcoin folk have been locked out of millions of dollars over a single flash drive. Article from January 2021 https://nypost.com/2021/01/15/man-who-lost-password-to-220m-worth-of-bitcoin-says-hes-made-peace/
Digital is the future. Not saying it's bitcoin, but somewhere..... Bitcoin is genuinely scarce, if lots of people want it..... I could be wrong, of course, but putting a few dollars into crypto and planning on letting it sit for a while doesn't seem like an all bad move.
it's an easy way to transfer black market cash around the world because nobody is tracking any of it and there's a whole stable of investors drooling to buy it up. it's a blockchain, with a limited or finite supply, there's only so many of them, and there can't be any more of them then the set amount of them. dogecoin is NOT like this at all, there is no limit on dogecoin, they can keep creating more if they like. So, if you need to pay off for a drug shipment, or for ransomware, they are going to want the untraceable bitcoin that no government is or can follow the transactions on, in fact anyone trying to move money around unnoticed by governments or law enforcement is using bitcoin or a similar product, and as long as the investors are there to buy them back up and the supply doesn't flood, it's going to hold it's value, because in the end $1 is $1 and the bitcoin is the delivery mechanism, and as long as they can cash it back in on the other side, the money moves without triggering a flag. the more they are worth each the easier it is to finish the transaction. Want to send $36 million to North Korea or Iran, send 1000 bitcoin. You won't get it done many other ways than that, not without a visit from the government. this is why it's so valued, and why investors want to play along, it's all the black market transactions they are banking on, while the black market transactions are banking on the investors.
I guess all the new "made up" words like "block chain" just don't register in my brain. Like why it's called a "coin" or "mining" etc.
North Korea and other less-than-savory actors hold things ransom (think cyber attacks) and demand payout in bitcoin. Not entirely untraceable per-se but it is damn hard to follow.
lets bnot forget to mention that deep web pedophiles use bitcoin to purchase illicit material and even buy children themselves. and no thats not conspiratorial, it's factual. drugs, hitmen, prostitutes, body parts, and plenty more
I'm in the dark and haven't a clue about it, but it must be worth something as it is just about the only thing you can pay with on the Dark Web. LOL
Ok. hmm, it's called a "coin" because that's a unit of measure that's understandable and it's a "currency" I suppose. There is no physical "coin", there's a blockchain technically. A "blockchain" is basically a ledger database. each coin is a block of the block chain in essence, new transactions and the history of transactions are recorded permanently that are unique to that specific block every time it transacts. Bitcoin was a reward for miners for doing computational problems on their computers or computer networks or servers ect. you put your computer to work solving the problems, and you get rewarded. at first it was easy, but as time went on it got harder and longer to unlock or "mine" another bitcoin. a typical database is structured like a "table" or "chart". a blockchain is structured more like the name implies, theres a block of information, every new transaction is another block that gets chained to the first block and so on. it's strictly chronological, like a ledger would be. Each block in the chain is given an exact timestamp when it is added to the chain. blockchain is now being used to store contracts, product inventories and First in, first out, digital images of original artworks or coins that are unique to that specific example from all others, digital trading cards of value that one person may want to transact with another, there's a lot of uses for it outside of crypto. Bitcoin and fractional bitcoins. 1 bitcoin is equivalent to 1,000 millibitcoins, 1,000,000 microbitcoins, or 100,000,000 satoshis (named after the supposed developer of the bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto). A satoshi is the smallest functional unit of bitcoin, lets say a Bitcoin is worth $36,477.21 One millibitcoin is valued at $36.47721 One microbitcoin is valued at $0.03647721 One satoshi is valued at $0.0003647721 with the fractional transactions of bitcoin, it's accessible to everyone technically rich or poor. all whole bitcoins are in Satoshi to begin with in the coding, it wasn't a modification so it could go fractional. it's just allocating the number of satoshis on the ledger in each transaction. the bitcoin, milli, micro, and satoshi are just ways for people to have access to it regardless of the 1 Bitcoin value. I don't really know it all, but that's how I understand it to be. I hope somewhere in there there was something useful to clarify something. hahaha Oh almost forgot "crypto" is just slang for encrypted. cryptocurrency is just another way of saying encrypted currency or digital currency, but I guess "cooler".
And as I understand it, it's all really Satoshis (and by satoshis I mean blocks of information chained together) on a blockchain ledger out there on the global internet, uniquely identified, and a transaction involves the information tied to the satoshis in the transaction, checking it's history for validity. And many different computers in different locations solving problems to verify that the code is legit in order to move them and tag them with a new identifier added to the blockchain for the transaction and the receivers digital wallet. 1 bitcoin is just a simplification of 100,000,000 satoshis. Old identifiers are invalidated, only the new identifier is valid until the next transaction, and if you lose the identifier, you lose it forever, there's no way to "recover it" it's unique to that transaction only where you received it. and there's no database to pull it from again because it's time stamps and transaction history of those unique satoshis involved. nothing could be changed to how it operates without all the computers around the world agreeing to the change in the operation, no one person or computer or minority group of people or computers could mis-account, no one could steal, no one could corrupt or kill it off or inflate it or deflate it, it takes many operations from many computers all automatic, which was the point of the "mining" in the first place, finding computers globally to handle the calculations and verifications, and it would have to go globally technologically dark for it to become irrelevant and useless except if people just flat out stopped using it completely.