What is Bitcoin? Introductory video and current Bitcoin price. Start Buy News FAQ Mining Alt-coins Price ... Global Vol. ... Diff. ... Bitcoin for Individuals Get started › Bitcoin for Merchants Get started › Store Bitcoins Get a wallet › Bitcoin Exchanges Buy bitcoins › Easy Person to Person Send Bitcoin from your computer, tablet, smart phone or other device, to anyone, anywhere in the world, day and night. Secure Strong cryptography Bitcoin verifies transactions with the same state-of-the-art encryption that is used in banking, military and government applications. Open Fully decentralized Bitcoin is open-source. Nobody owns it; the most popular client is maintained by a community of open-source developers. Fair Minimal Fees Using the Bitcoin network is free, except for a voluntary fee you can use to speed up transaction processing. I'm a big fan of Bitcoin... Regulation of money supply needs to be depoliticized. Al Gore Former US vice president and winner of Nobel Peace prize Bitcoin is a technological tour de force. Bill Gates Microsoft Co-founder Every informed person needs to know about Bitcoin because it might be one of the world's most important developments. Leon Louw Nobel Peace prize nominee Overview - Table of Contents What is Bitcoin? Who created Bitcoin? Who is involved in Bitcoin? What is the blockchain? Who controls the Bitcoin network? How does Bitcoin work? Free Bitcoins What is Bitcoin? With the Bitcoin price so volatile everyone is curious. Bitcoin, the category creator of blockchain technology, is the World Wide Ledger yet extremely complicated and no one definition fully encapsulates it. By analogy it is like being able to send a gold coin via email. It is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen. Bitcoin was the first practical implementation and is currently the most prominent triple entry bookkeeping system in existence. Beware of the confusingly similar Bcash, BCH, Bitcoin Cash project. Visualize and Download High-Resolution Infographic Who created Bitcoin? The first Bitcoin specification and proof of concept was published in 2009 by an unknown individual under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto who revealed little about himself and left the project in late 2010. The Bitcoin community has since grown exponentially. Satoshi's anonymity often raises unjustified concerns because of a misunderstanding of Bitcoin's open-source nature. Everyone has access to all of the source code all of the time and any developer can review or modify the software code. As such, the identity of Bitcoin's inventor is probably as relevant today as the identity of the person who invented paper. Who is involved in Bitcoin? Over $1B of investment into Bitcoin and blockchain companies has taken place resulting in thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of individuals involved from around the world. What is the Blockchain? Who controls the Bitcoin network? Nobody owns the Bitcoin network much like no one owns the technology behind email or the Internet. Bitcoin transactions are verified by Bitcoin miners which has an entire industry and Bitcoin cloud mining options. While developers are improving the software they cannot force a change in the Bitcoin protocol because all users are free to choose what software and version they use. In order to stay compatible with each other, all users need to use software complying with the same rules. Bitcoin can only work correctly with a complete consensus among all users. Therefore, all users and developers have a strong incentive to protect this consensus. How does Bitcoin work? From a user perspective, Bitcoin is nothing more than a mobile app or computer program that provides a personal Bitcoin wallet and enables a user to send and receive bitcoins. Behind the scenes, the Bitcoin network is sharing a massive public ledger called the "block chain". This ledger contains every transaction ever processed which enables a user's computer to verify the validity of each transaction. The authenticity of each transaction is protected by digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses therefore allowing all users to have full control over sending bitcoins. Thus, there is no fraud, no chargebacks and no identifying information that could be compromised resulting in identity theft. To learn more about Bitcoin, you can consult the original Bitcoin whitepaper, read through the extremely thorough Frequently Asked Questions, listen to a Bitcoin podcast or read the latest Bitcoin news. 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