What is Bitcoin? A Begginner's Guide.

 

 Introduction to Bitcoins:

Bitcoin is Newly introduced form of currency, which is purely decentralized. Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. No one controls it. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by lots of people running computers all around the world, using software
that solves mathematical problems. It’s the first example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency.

Who Created Bitcoin?

A software developer called Satoshi Nakamoto proposed bitcoin, which was an electronic payment system based on mathematical proof. The idea was to produce a currency independent of any central authority.

How Bitcoins are Created?  

Bitcoins are not printed like paper currency. Bitcoins are created as a reward for processing work in which users offer their computing power to verify and record payments into the public ledger. This activity is called mining, which individuals or companies engage in, in exchange for transaction fees and newly created bitcoins. Besides mining, bitcoins can be obtained in exchange for fiat money, products, and services .

Characteristics Of Bitcoin:

1. It's Decentralized - Bitcoins have no central authority, like Central banks etc.
2.  Easy to Setup - its not like opening a account in a bank, as banks charge fee for account opening and transactions you made but in case of bitcoins everything is free of charge and anonymous.
3. It's anonymous - Person having bitcoins account will have no identity, they just have been issued a secret code for processing of Bitcoins from their accounts.
4. Completely Transparent - Bitcoins system is completely transparent, you can see the whole transactions made in bitcoin system, its open to all. That's why person's having bitcoins account have no identity in bitcoins system.
5. It's Fast - Transactions are very fast, it takes only seconds to process any transaction.
6. It's  non-repudiable - When your bitcoins are sent, there’s no getting them back, unless the recipient returns them to you. They’re gone forever.

Who are accepting bitcoin's? 

As of August 2014 established firms that accept payments in bitcoin include Atomic Mall, Clearly Canadian, Dell,Dish Network, Expedia, Newegg, PrivateFly, Overstock.com,the Sacramento Kings, TigerDirect, Virgin Galactic, and Zynga.

How One can Buy Bitcoins?

For Buying and storing Bitcoins, you need to have Bitcoin wallet. 

The two main options are:
 (1) a software wallet stored on the hard drive of your computer.
 (2) an online, web-based service.

Both have their vulnerabilities: if you store it all locally on your computer make sure you back up your wallet regularly in case the drive becomes corrupted; and online web wallets employ varying degrees of security against hackers, from quite good (multi-factor authentication) to quite poor (ID and password).

At this time, the largest full trading exchanges by volume are Bitfinex (Hong Kong), Bitstamp (US), BTC-e (unknown), Kraken (US), Huobi (China), OKCoin (China) and BTC China.

 CoinBase is a popular wallet service that will also trade your fiat currency for bitcoins. The company has web and mobile (Android) apps, as well as an unofficial but approved iOS wallet. Originally a US-only service, Coinbase has recently opened up to a large number of European countries.

Source: Wikipedia

Source: CoinDesk