What Even Is a Bitcoin Anyway?

Everything you ever wanted to know about Bitcoin (but were afraid to ask)

Just what IS this Bitcoin thing that you keep hearing about? Will it affect you? Do you even need to know what it is?

These are all great questions and if you’re just beginning your journey with this global phenomenon, you’ll likely have a ton more.

When I first discovered it some years ago, I found that all the information available was either very technical or the articles assumed you already knew what it was, which really didn’t help. So, I decided to put this essential guide together with all the commonly asked questions in one place for ease of reference.

Its simplest definition is a global peer-to-peer monetary system, but even that may not immediately make it clear, so further explanation is probably required.

When you make a payment to anyone using any traditional banking method, including bank transfers or even Paypal, you have to go through a central body of some sort. That central body controls the money flow and usually takes a cut for its trouble. It can also deny your payment or ask questions about it, should the need arise.

This system has worked for centuries, but it has issues, the biggest of which is trust. Banks have a terrible history of using other people’s money in appalling ways and the growing number of fines being paid globally by these organisations for rate fixing, money laundering and other large scale offences shows how susceptible they are to human greed. Put simply, we can’t be trusted with it and it has created problems for generations. However, we stuck with it mainly because, until now, there has never been an alternative.

In 2009, a mysterious coder, by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed and implemented a completely trustless way of creating a new, global currency based entirely on maths, cryptography and computing power.

It could be accepted anywhere by anyone without any form of central interference, all that the two people concerned needed was an internet connection of some sort and a PC or phone to make the transfer. The billion or so people who didn’t have access to banking…

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