Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a decentralized peer to peer currency based on the technology of blockchain. Bitcoin was originally conceived in 2008 and released in 2009 by a user who goes by the pseudoname "Satoshi Nakamoto". Nobody is aware of Satoshi's real name or other information, but some argue that it doesn't matter. The principles that bitcoin is built upon are anonymity, privacy and decentralization. Bitcoin is the currency of the future due to those being the primary principles envisioned in its creation. The primary idea of bitcoin, which also happens to be its most famous principle is that of decentralization, the technology that bitcoin is built upon, the “Blockchain” is a technology which allows uncontrollable access, no one party can take down the blockchain because there is no central server, the idea of bitcoin’s decentralization is that a ledger of all bitcoin transactions is held on thousands upon thousands of devices, nodes and servers around the planet, this global ledger contains all bitcoin transactions today and is roughly 250GB in file size as of the 25th of September, 2019, this ledger is spread amongst every device that hosts it’s own “Node” or bitcoin server, this widespread-ness of bitcoin allows it to be invincible to being taken down, which is why so many people prefer bitcoin over traditional sources of money like banks and credit cards. Bitcoin is superior to these technologies in the sense that there is no overarching entity that can seize your funds or freeze your accounts, bitcoin is regarded to as “The People’s Money”, because you have the option to be the sole custodian of your assets, meaning nobody who doesn’t have access to your Bitcoin private key can access your funds no matter what, especially if you use 2Factor authentication and store your private key on an encrypted/protected drive. The next principle that bitcoin is most often praised for is its emphasis on privacy, you are not required to enter even a sliver of personal information to begin holding bitcoin without control from a central authority if you use a non-custodial wallet such as electrum, bitcoin is sent and received using “Bitcoin Addresses”, which are essentially payment codes that users can send money to or receive money from, an example of a bitcoin address would be “1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa” (This is the genesis address, the first bitcoin address ever created). As you can see, that address doesn’t contain even a tiny piece of personally identifiable information, making bitcoin and other crypto-coins the perfect currency for people who like their privacy. Due to the nature of bitcoin addresses, bitcoin is almost untraceable, but there is one weakness to this. The bitcoin ledger is distributed amongst so many nodes, so if a transaction is deleted on one node, thousands of other nodes will still have that transaction saved, every transaction that any person will ever do is publicly visible on the bitcoin ledger and will be for all of eternity, this is the one compromise that people have to make in exchange for total lack of personal identification. If a bitcoin mixing/tumbling service is used, this problem can be remedied, as the purpose of a bitcoin tumbler is to mix your bitcoins with others, making it harder to trace transactions back to you.