

The downside here is that a hack or cyberattack could be a disaster because it could erase Bitcoin wallets with little hope of getting the value back.Īs for mining Bitcoins, the process requires electrical energy. This means Bitcoin will never experience inflation.

Therefore, the total number of Bitcoins in circulation will approach 21 million but never actually reach that figure.

At the moment, that reward is 12.5 Bitcoins. He (or they) reached that figure by calculating that people would discover, or "mine," a certain number of blocks of transactions each day.Įvery four years, the number of Bitcoins released in relation to the previous cycle gets reduced by 50%, along with the reward to miners for discovering new blocks. Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, ensured that there would ever only be 21 million Bitcoins in existence. And that work comes in the form of mining.īut let's take a step back. Like any other form of money, it takes work to produce them. There are thousands of cryptocurrencies floating out on the market now, but Bitcoin is far and away the most popular.īitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies don't just fall out of the sky. There had been several iterations of cryptocurrency over the years, but Bitcoin truly thrust cryptocurrencies forward in the late 2000s.
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Blockchain tech offers a way to securely and efficiently create a tamper-proof log of sensitive activity (anything from international money transfers to shareholder records).īlockchain's conceptual framework and underlying code is useful for a variety of financial processes because of the potential it has to give companies a secure, digital alternative to banking processes that are typically bureaucratic, time-consuming, paper-heavy, and expensive.Ĭryptocurrencies are essentially just digital money, digital tools of exchange that use cryptography and the aforementioned blockchain technology to facilitate secure and anonymous transactions. Think of it as a kind of highly encrypted and verified shared Google Document, in which each entry in the sheet depends on a logical relationship to all its predecessors. Essentially, it's a shared database populated with entries that must be confirmed and encrypted. Blockchain tech is actually rather easy to understand at its core.
