Anyone hear of Bitcoin? It’s a new form of currency which is used peer to peer. I heard it has recently increased significantly in value. I am sill figuring out exactly how it works.
Also I didn’t post any links and I’m not just trying to advertise the site or anything. If the mods don’t think this post is kosher please don’t shut down my account, thanks. ![:slight_smile: :slight_smile:](https://forums.babypips.com/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5)
I’d stay away from something like this. Governments will stomp down on this sort of thing if it looks like it’s gaining any sort of real traction and you could end up holding a big pile of worthless, illegal bitcoins.
Also, it looks like a bad design to me - looks to me like the early adopters might do ok out of it but that’s about it. This thing has deflation built into it - your money is basically increasing in value over time due to the algorithim which introduces money into the overall supply via mining given that the injection supply is designed to taper off over time. So instead of making a currency which is useful for spending the designers seem to have made a currency which is good for hording because you think the value will increase over time.
Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. The name also refers both to the open source software he designed to make use of the currency and to the peer-to-peer network formed by running that software.
Bitcoin avoids central authorities and issuers unlike other digital currencies. Bitcoin uses a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network to journal transactions, and uses digital signatures and proof-of-work to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that bitcoins can be spent only once per owner and only by the person who owns them.
Bitcoins can be saved on a personal computer in the form of a wallet file or kept with a third party wallet service, and in either case bitcoins can be sent over the Internet to anyone with a Bitcoin address. The peer-to-peer topology and lack of central administration are features that make it infeasible for any authority (governmental or otherwise) to manipulate the quantity of bitcoins in circulation, thereby mitigating inflation.
Bitcoin is not a real money. It’s online "currency’ - virtual tokens that can be exchanged for goods and services at places that accept it, the same way you’d give someone a dollar for a cookie