Bitcoin


What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a digital currency designed in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto.

What makes this new currency great?
>There’s no central authority managing it.
>You can transfer them to anyone that has a digital wallet, for free (in any country). Ther's no third party involved.
>Your account can not be frozen.

Damn Bitcoins how do they work?!

The first subject I will talk about is transactions: In order to give and recibe bitcoins(BTC from now on) you will need the official client (download link is below). Once you got this, and it connects to the Bitcoin network, it performs two primary actions:


>It generates a pair of unique keys. One public and the other one private (both mathematically linked).
An example of a Bitcoin adress: 1GkNSJurCKkv2jj2Ajcwf2So1JKt639qcV.
>It downloads the hole public log that contains all the transactions ever done.

When you send some bitcoins to someone, you create a message (transaction), attaching the new owner's public key to this amount of coins, and sign it with your own private key. After this is done, the transactions is broadcasted to everyone in the network (clients that are not involved in the transfer).

This way all the clients verify the integrity of the message: they check that this transaction is legit (uses the public key to confirm that the true owner of the pair sent the money) and that the person that sends the money has the BTC to spend (they can check this with the block chain).

Some of these clients (a.k.a. miners) are in a race to solve some sort of a cryptographic puzzle so they can add a new block to the block chain and this way be rewarded with BTC.

"Bitcoin transactions are broadcast to the network by the sender, and all peers generating coins collect them and add them to the block they're working on."

When your software receives the updated log it knows your payment was successful.

Glossary
>Block: Data is permanently recorded in the Bitcoin network through blocks. Each block contains all recent transactions, a nonce (random number), and the hash of the previous block. A block is "solved" (published and considered valid by peers) when the SHA-256 hash of the entire block is numerically below the current target.
>Block chain: A full copy of a currency's block chain contains every transaction ever executed in the currency. With this information, one can find out how much value belonged to each address at any point in history.

How do I get started?
First of all you need a digital wallet . You can either download the official Bitcoin client from here: http://www.bitcoin.org/ or you could use online wallets such as: InstaWallet or MyBitcoin (I’ve never tried this, use them at your own risk). If you choose to get the downloadable client make sure to back up the .dat file frequently.

After that you can get 0.05 BTC for free from here: https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/ to get started with.

How do I get moar of this awesome coins?
You can: Purchase or Generate them.

Generating BTC: Mining
I owe you this section, it's a little bit long and i'm thinking to make a new entry explaining it since this is just an intro to Bitcoin.

What’s a pool?
It’s a server where multiple clients contribuite in order to generate a block. After it’s done the profit is shared among all according to the power of process of each client (Mhash/s). 

This is a list with a few pool’s that I’m aware of:
Swepool.net: http://swepool.net/
BitcoinPool: http://bitcoinpool.org/ << I belive this one is down.
Simplecoins: http://simplecoin.us/


Online webs to buy/sell BTC

BitcoinMarkethttps://www.bitcoinmarket.com/                                                                       ConBitcoinhttp://conbitcoin.com/
BitMarkethttps://bitmarket.eu/
TradeHillhttps://www.tradehill.com/
Mtgoxhttps://mtgox.com/



These are the prices according to mtgox.com. 21/07/2011


OK, now I have 1 BTC. What can I do with it?
Sell it.
Save it.
Purchase things in markets that accept BTC as payment. (I’ll try to make a list in the near future).

There's no need for 1 BTC exactly, if i'm not wrong it supports 8 decimal places.

I’m leaving here some links that I belive can be useful if you are interested in BTC and want to want to get more knowledge about this subject:

And a couple of videos


The last one starts at 0:41:52.


28 comentarios:

  Reply To This Comment Anonymous

July 21, 2011 at 10:50 AM

I guess the will disappear soon.

  Reply To This Comment Inside Journalism

July 21, 2011 at 11:05 AM

The future of all currency lies in this kind of thing, climb aboard now!

  Reply To This Comment GMSoccerPicks

July 21, 2011 at 11:36 AM

That crap is all the rage now. Expect a bitcoin bubble, it will happen sometime soon. Mark my words

  Reply To This Comment Stephanie

July 21, 2011 at 11:48 AM

I remember hearing about this years ago and I thought it was just a fad and would go away. Boy was I wrong =(

  Reply To This Comment Shaw

July 21, 2011 at 1:05 PM

I still think this is just a temporary fad

  Reply To This Comment Indiehashtag

July 21, 2011 at 1:36 PM

this wont catch on

  Reply To This Comment Aesthetikos

July 21, 2011 at 1:39 PM

Hmmm... I bet people will find a way to exploit this in a malicious way... I just like it the way it is, with paper and metals!

  Reply To This Comment ToDecomposeDude

July 21, 2011 at 3:53 PM

I don't think it'll last long. As soon as it becomes a thread to eral currencies, world leaders are going to make it dissappear

  Reply To This Comment Dylanthulhu

July 21, 2011 at 4:11 PM

Paying for anything with Bitcoins is about as shady as it gets.

  Reply To This Comment PabloO

July 22, 2011 at 7:54 AM

@ToDecomposeDude

Well even if that happens, you could see Bitcoins not as an investment to the future but like a way to make money today.

  Reply To This Comment Amber

July 22, 2011 at 11:11 AM

I understood about half of that, the other half lost me. Maybe my tech savy fiance can explain it to me lol

  Reply To This Comment ebm93

July 22, 2011 at 11:32 AM

Interesting. Thanks for the information.

  Reply To This Comment Dieguii

July 22, 2011 at 4:09 PM

interesting, but how many people uses this in the world? I mean, will this be a useful tool in the future?

  Reply To This Comment Internet Catch Of The Day

July 23, 2011 at 3:18 PM

I'm going to try my hand at mining, if it works out, I may start my own pool

  Reply To This Comment Anonymous

July 24, 2011 at 6:48 AM

This definitely looks like a good idea... but until I can use bitcoins to pay my rent and buy food... I just can't afford to jump on this train.

  Reply To This Comment DM

July 24, 2011 at 6:56 PM

Seems like a scam tbh

  Reply To This Comment William Burrow

July 25, 2011 at 10:58 AM

Mostly used for online drugs, but still cool. ill stick to paypal though

  Reply To This Comment Kevin H

July 25, 2011 at 11:03 AM

I heard about this on Runescape forums...It seems interesting but too much work x_x

  Reply To This Comment GMSoccerPicks

July 25, 2011 at 12:59 PM

Updates man, we need updates!

  Reply To This Comment Charles Godfrey

July 25, 2011 at 6:31 PM

I've been following Bitcoins closely. They are an unintended pyramidal scam at best and a way to hyperinflation at worst. Produce money without control and eventually the bubble will burst, just like GMSoccerPicks said.

  Reply To This Comment Anonymous

July 26, 2011 at 11:00 AM

I really need time to investigate about, seems so "ponzi scam" to me.

  Reply To This Comment PabloO

July 26, 2011 at 11:24 AM

i'm detecting scepticism in all of you lol. Be patient these week i'll make a new entry explaining mining and i will look around for some people making money out of this.

  Reply To This Comment Montana

July 26, 2011 at 6:27 PM

I had 20 bitcoins. Sold them all when it spiked at $29. Paid my rent for the month. However i was also sad i didnt buy more.

  Reply To This Comment Siveon

August 2, 2011 at 9:41 AM

This sounds interesting yet i never heard of this before, time to do some searching!

  Reply To This Comment NuyoricanGuy

August 7, 2011 at 4:44 PM

Interesting...I have heard about this before. There is a website on the internet that sells drugs with this currency.

  Reply To This Comment jope

August 9, 2011 at 6:11 PM

interesting :P

  Reply To This Comment Ate Jo

August 17, 2011 at 7:06 AM

This is my first time to hear this kind of digital currency.. Hope it will be used properly..

  Reply To This Comment Baby

August 29, 2011 at 1:18 PM

so how many buttcoins DID u gather?