INTRODUCTION TO BITCOIN: THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT BITCOINS
Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptographic currency system, proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto . Bitcoin is an online and anonymous currency that can be used to make global transactions. Unlike similar services such as PayPal, the servers that support Bitcoin are distributed across the world, which makes it impossible, or at least very difficult, for governments to shut down. Bitcoins can also be used to purchase traditional hard currencies like dollars, euros or yen. Based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, Bitcoin users are able to issue transactions carrying payments in bitcoins. To provide some form of anonymity, direct personally identifiable information are omitted from any transaction; instead, source and destination are encoded in the form of public keys, which serve as pseudonyms. Every party can generate as many public keys as he wishes; the corresponding private keys are used to authenticate (sign) transactions and are stored in private wallets eithe...