Where bitcoin comes from

You can use it to buy products and services, but not many shops accept Bitcoin yet and some countries have banned it altogether. However, some companies are beginning to buy into its growing influence.

The debate about cryptocurrency and energy consumption

In October last year, for example, the online payment service, PayPal, announced that it would be allowing its customers to buy and sell Bitcoin. The physical Bitcoins you see in photos are a novelty. They would be worthless without the private codes printed inside them. Each Bitcoin is basically a computer file which is stored in a 'digital wallet' app on a smartphone or computer.

People can send Bitcoins or part of one to your digital wallet, and you can send Bitcoins to other people. Every single transaction is recorded in a public list called the blockchain. This makes it possible to trace the history of Bitcoins to stop people from spending coins they do not own, making copies or undo-ing transactions. There are three main ways people get Bitcoins.

In order for the Bitcoin system to work, people can make their computer process transactions for everybody. The computers are made to work out incredibly difficult sums.

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Occasionally they are rewarded with a Bitcoin for the owner to keep. People set up powerful computers just to try and get Bitcoins. This is called mining. But the sums are becoming more and more difficult to stop too many Bitcoins being generated. If you started mining now it could be years before you got a single Bitcoin. You could end up spending more money on electricity for your computer than the Bitcoin would be worth. There are lots of things other than money which we consider valuable like gold and diamonds. The Aztecs used cocoa beans as money!

Bitcoins are valuable because people are willing to exchange them for real goods and services, and even cash. Some people like the fact that Bitcoin is not controlled by the government or banks. People can also spend their Bitcoins fairly anonymously. Although all transactions are recorded, nobody would know which 'account number' was yours unless you told them. In an online chat with social media users in January , the world's richest man, Elon Musk, said he was a big supporter of Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrency for Dummies: Bitcoin and Beyond

In addition, transactions can be linked to individuals and companies through "idioms of use" e. Wallets and similar software technically handle all bitcoins as equivalent, establishing the basic level of fungibility. Researchers have pointed out that the history of each bitcoin is registered and publicly available in the blockchain ledger, and that some users may refuse to accept bitcoins coming from controversial transactions, which would harm bitcoin's fungibility.

Gox froze accounts of users who deposited bitcoins that were known to have just been stolen.

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The blocks in the blockchain were originally limited to 32 megabytes in size. The block size limit of one megabyte was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in Eventually the block size limit of one megabyte created problems for transaction processing, such as increasing transaction fees and delayed processing of transactions.

How are New Bitcoins Created?

Satoshi Nakamoto stated in his white paper that: "The root problem with conventional currencies is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. According to the European Central Bank , the decentralization of money offered by bitcoin has its theoretical roots in the Austrian school of economics , especially with Friedrich von Hayek in his book Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined , [] in which Hayek advocates a complete free market in the production, distribution and management of money to end the monopoly of central banks.

According to The New York Times , libertarians and anarchists were attracted to the philosophical idea behind bitcoin. Early bitcoin supporter Roger Ver said: "At first, almost everyone who got involved did so for philosophical reasons. We saw bitcoin as a great idea, as a way to separate money from the state. Nigel Dodd argues in The Social Life of Bitcoin that the essence of the bitcoin ideology is to remove money from social, as well as governmental, control.

The declaration includes a message of crypto-anarchism with the words: "Bitcoin is inherently anti-establishment, anti-system, and anti-state. Bitcoin undermines governments and disrupts institutions because bitcoin is fundamentally humanitarian. David Golumbia says that the ideas influencing bitcoin advocates emerge from right-wing extremist movements such as the Liberty Lobby and the John Birch Society and their anti-Central Bank rhetoric, or, more recently, Ron Paul and Tea Party -style libertarianism.

It takes control back from central authorities. It's revolutionary.

A study of Google Trends data found correlations between bitcoin-related searches and ones related to computer programming and illegal activity, but not libertarianism or investment topics. Bitcoin is a digital asset designed to work in peer-to-peer transactions as a currency. Economists define money as serving the following three purposes: a store of value , a medium of exchange , and a unit of account. Shiller writes that bitcoin has potential as a unit of account for measuring the relative value of goods, as with Chile's Unidad de Fomento , but that "Bitcoin in its present form [ According to research by Cambridge University , between 2.

The number of users has grown significantly since , when there were ,—1. The overwhelming majority of bitcoin transactions take place on a cryptocurrency exchange , rather than being used in transactions with merchants. Prices are not usually quoted in units of bitcoin and many trades involve one, or sometimes two, conversions into conventional currencies. In and bitcoin's acceptance among major online retailers included only three of the top U.

Bitcoin is "not actually usable" for retail transactions because of high costs and the inability to process chargebacks , according to Nicholas Weaver, a researcher quoted by Bloomberg. High price volatility and transaction fees make paying for small retail purchases with bitcoin impractical, according to economist Kim Grauer. However, bitcoin continues to be used for large-item purchases on sites such as Overstock. Bitcoins can be bought on digital currency exchanges.

Per researchers, "there is little sign of bitcoin use" in international remittances despite high fees charged by banks and Western Union who compete in this market. In , the National Australia Bank closed accounts of businesses with ties to bitcoin, [] and HSBC refused to serve a hedge fund with links to bitcoin. On 10 December , the Chicago Board Options Exchange started trading bitcoin futures, [] followed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange , which started trading bitcoin futures on 17 December The request was motivated by oil company's goal to pay its suppliers. The Winklevoss twins have purchased bitcoin.

Other methods of investment are bitcoin funds. The first regulated bitcoin fund was established in Jersey in July and approved by the Jersey Financial Services Commission. Forbes named bitcoin the best investment of According to bitinfocharts. In August , MicroStrategy invested in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin - Wikipedia

The price of bitcoins has gone through cycles of appreciation and depreciation referred to by some as bubbles and busts. According to Mark T. Unusual for an asset, bitcoin weekend trading during December was higher than for weekdays. Because of bitcoin's decentralized nature and its trading on online exchanges located in many countries, regulation of bitcoin has been difficult. However, the use of bitcoin can be criminalized, and shutting down exchanges and the peer-to-peer economy in a given country would constitute a de facto ban.

Regulations and bans that apply to bitcoin probably extend to similar cryptocurrency systems. In October , the Islamic Republic News Agency announced pending regulations that would require bitcoin miners in Iran to sell bitcoin to the Central Bank of Iran , and the central bank would use it for imports.

The U. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has issued four "Customer Advisories" for bitcoin and related investments.

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Securities and Exchange Commission warned that investments involving bitcoin might have high rates of fraud, and that investors might be solicited on social media sites. The European Banking Authority issued a warning in focusing on the lack of regulation of bitcoin, the chance that exchanges would be hacked, the volatility of bitcoin's price, and general fraud. An official investigation into bitcoin traders was reported in May Justice Department launched an investigation into possible price manipulation, including the techniques of spoofing and wash trades.

Following the first delivery date in January , the CME requested extensive detailed trading information but several of the exchanges refused to provide it and later provided only limited data. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission then subpoenaed the data from the exchanges. State and provincial securities regulators, coordinated through the North American Securities Administrators Association , are investigating "bitcoin scams" and ICOs in 40 jurisdictions.

Academic research published in the Journal of Monetary Economics concluded that price manipulation occurred during the Mt Gox bitcoin theft and that the market remains vulnerable to manipulation. Research by John M. Griffin and Amin Shams in suggests that trading associated with increases in the amount of the Tether cryptocurrency and associated trading at the Bitfinex exchange account for about half of the price increase in bitcoin in late The Bank for International Settlements summarized several criticisms of bitcoin in Chapter V of their annual report.

The criticisms include the lack of stability in bitcoin's price, the high energy consumption, high and variable transactions costs, the poor security and fraud at cryptocurrency exchanges, vulnerability to debasement from forking , and the influence of miners. In , The Economist described bitcoin criticisms mentioning its volatility and shady image as unfair, since bitcoin had been relatively stable during that year, and the shady image may have compelled users to overlook the capabilities of the blockchain technology.

Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, has been described as an economic bubble by at least eight Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates at various times, including Robert Shiller on 1 March , [] Joseph Stiglitz on 29 November , [] and Richard Thaler on 21 December As of [update] , The Economist estimated that even if all miners used modern facilities, the combined electricity consumption would be In July BBC reported bitcoin consumes about 7 gigawatts, 0.

To lower costs, bitcoin miners have set up in places like Iceland where geothermal energy is cheap and cooling Arctic air is free. Concerns about bitcoin's environmental impact relate bitcoin's energy consumption to carbon emissions. The results of recent studies analyzing bitcoin's carbon footprint vary. Journalists, economists, investors, and the central bank of Estonia have voiced concerns that bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.

Bitcoin held at exchanges are vulnerable to theft through phishing , scamming , and hacking.