Bitcoin: Cheat Sheet | Finance. Could Bitcoin be the global online currency? With the rapid growth of eCommerce over the last decade, online payment has become a hugely influential area. This niche has made fortunes for credit card companies, and services like Paypal, providing the ability for real currency to be used online with relative ease. With the estimated total value of eCommerce approaching a trillion US$, there is another solution that may be even more useful. Perhaps it is time for a global online currency? Bitcoin is such a currency, created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is an anonymous, open source and peer to peer fiat currency. There is no central authority that issues new Bitcoins or tracks transactions, instead this is handled by the CPUs of the distributed nodes of the network.
But how does this work? Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, securing itself via automated encryption. How it works New Bitcoins are introduced slowly by users running nodes for the network as they create blocks for the system. Cryptocurrency. When the virtual currency bitcoin was released, in January 2009, it appeared to be an interesting way for people to trade among themselves in a secure, low-cost, and private fashion. The Bitcoin network, designed by an unknown programmer with the handle “Satoshi Nakamoto,” used a decentralized peer-to-peer system to verify transactions, which meant that people could exchange goods and services electronically, and anonymously, without having to rely on third parties like banks. Its medium of exchange, the bitcoin, was an invented currency that people could earn—or, in Bitcoin’s jargon, “mine”—by lending their computers’ resources to service the needs of the Bitcoin network.
Once in existence, bitcoins could also be bought and sold for dollars or other currencies on online exchanges. Yet over the past year and a half Bitcoin has become, for some, much more. Bitcoin is not going to make government-backed currencies obsolete. Thing Reviewed: Bitcoin www.bitcoin.org. Bitcoin, the Peer-to-Peer Currency that Hopes to Change the World - Industry.