The bitcoin price has surged over recent months as interest surrounding social media giant Facebook’s planned libra project reached fever-pitch but has swung wildly as global regulators poured cold water on Facebook’s ambitions.
In traditional fiat money systems, governments simply print more money when they need to. But in bitcoin, money isn’t printed at all – it is discovered. Computers around the world ‘mine’ for coins by competing with each other.
At its most basic, a fork is what happens when a blockchain diverges into two potential paths forward — either with regard to a network’s transaction history or a new rule in deciding what makes a transaction valid.
Bitcoin is built on a blockchain system. This means that transactions using Bitcoin are processed by being placed in blocks and then added to the chain. Each block contains just 1MB of information, which limits the amount of transactions that can be placed on each block.
Bitcoin mining isn’t so much about discovering new bitcoins like a gold miner searches for gold. Bitcoin mining is all about being rewarded for validating the authenticity of pending bitcoin transactions.
Once heralded as the “silver to bitcoin’s gold”, the developers behind the long-running digital currency litecoin are seeking to re-establish the project’s prior position as the world’s second most popular cryptocurrency.
Ethereum remains the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, and it only loses out to bitcoin. This is impressive for a digital currency only launched only months ago.
The digital currency has gone on a wild streak over the weekend, peaking above $700 on Monday, and is currently hovering around that point – $683.58 as of writing…
Bitcoin is a new way of paying for things that is gaining popularity. This guide explains how it works.
Bitcoin is different than any currency you’ve used before, so it’s very important to understand some key points. Unlike government issued money that can be inflated at will, the supply of Bitcoin is mathematically limited …
