Bitcoin - Big Businesses That Accept Bitcoin
It is not controlled by a government's central bank, but rather by consensus of its users and nodes. It is not created by a limited mint in a building, but rather by distributed open source software and computing. And it requires a form of actual work for creation. More on that shortly. The first BitCoins were in a block of 50 (the "Genesis Block") created by Satoshi Nakomoto in January 2009. It didn't really have any value at first. It was just a cryptographer's plaything based on a paper published two months earlier by Nakomoto. Nakotmoto is an apparently fictional name - no one seems to know who he or she or they is/are. Who keeps track of it all? Once the Genesis Block was created, BitCoins have since been generated by doing the work of keeping track of all transactions for all BitCoins as a kind of public ledger. The nodes / computers doing the calculations on the ledger are rewarded for doing so. When the central bank in Cyprus froze bank accounts and lim...