What is Bitcoin and why you should know about it?
As of now, 1 Bitcoin is approximately worth a staggering 590,000 Pakistani Ruppees! Its value has seen an exponential rise, particularly over the last year.
One of the reasons for Bitcoin’s rising popularity is that it is decentralized. There is no government, bank, or higher authority governing it.
This is being seen as a way for the public to regain the some of the ‘financial influence’ from these higher authorities. Moreover, Bitcoin transactions are ‘peer-to-peer’ which means that no third-party is involved between.
Bitcoin is a form of currency. However, it is unlike other typical paper-based forms of currency such as Dollars, Euros, and Ruppees. What makes it distinctive is that it is completely digital.
There are other ‘Cryptocurrencies’ as well such as Ethereum, and Ripple. The technology that enables all of these Cryptocurrencies is called the ‘Blockchain’. To put it simply, it’s a record of all Cryptocurrency based transactions that can be viewed by anyone.
The whole concept of Bitcoin came into being in 2009 and it was introduced by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. It was released in the form of an open-source software.
The interesting thing here is that the identity of ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ is unknown. Is it a person, is it a group of people, is it an organisation? There have been many speculations regarding ‘its’ identity but no one knows for sure.
There are two ways people may join the Bitcoin community. The first option is to ‘mine’ Bitcoins. Mining basically means generating Bitcoins. To do this, you need powerful computing machines called GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) and a steady power supply!
The other, more commonly used way is by simply investing in Bitcoin. However, do keep in mind that the value of Bitcoin undergoes many fluctuations and some countries are also declaring it illegal.
For good or for worse, Bitcoin is gradually changing the financial world as we speak and is bound to have an impact on everyone!
