Bitcoin (₿) is a decentralized digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries. Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency began use in 2009 when its implementation was released as open-source software.Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. They can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services, but the real-world value of the coins is extremely volatile. Research produced by the University of Cambridge estimated that in 2017, there were 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin. Users choose to participate in the digital currency for a number of reasons: ideologies such as commitment to anarchism, decentralization and libertarianism, convenience, using the currency as an investment and pseudonymity of transactions. Increased use has led to a desire among governments for regulation in order to tax, facilitate legal use in trade and for other reasons (such as investigations for money laundering and price manipulation).
Bitcoin has been criticized for its use in illegal transactions, the large amount of electricity (and thus carbon footprint) used by mining, price volatility, and thefts from exchanges. Some economists and commentators have characterized it as a speculative bubble at various times. Bitcoin has also been used as an investment, although several regulatory agencies have issued investor alerts about bitcoin.The word bitcoin was defined in a white paper published on 31 October 2008. It is a compound of the words bit and coin. No uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization exists; some sources use Bitcoin, capitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoin, lowercase, for the unit of account. The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Oxford English Dictionary advocate the use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases.
One of the advantages of keeping your money in a bank account is that banks are under various duties to help you keep control of that money in the event that someone steals your bank card, and to compensate you if they culpably fail to do so. Is the same true of crypto assets kept on the...
Hello all,
I have a question regarding FPGA performance vs GPU (I've reviewed it before). I’m trying to recover lost bitcoins that I mined in the early days. I knew it was important to keep the private key but in the end I somehow managed to lose my private key but I still have 24 out of 32...
Hi everyone,
I apologize to the mod if I posted in the wrong section.
For my exam of Machine Learning, I would like to implement a part of the work presented in this paper. In this work, the authors used two ML methods in cascade for forecasting Bitcoin. Starting from the initial data, they...
Hello everyone,
I am determined to clearly understand bitcoin. This is what I know so along with my dilemmas:
Bitcoins are a virtual currency with encryption. The exchange of bitcoins is decentralized in the sense that there is/are no institutions like banks that validate the exchange of...
X-axis = past 1-week percent change of the search term "best bitcoin wallet"
Y-axis = future 1-week percent change of the price of bitcoin
From the data, if the number of searches increases by more than 150%, it seems the price of bitcoin almost always increases, however, there are only 10...
Can it be treated like a rare commodity that is of high value? Gold isn't legal tender either but it's rarity and demand keeps the market value reasonably high.
Are there any fundamental reasons why bitcoin wouldn't turn out to be like a precious metal?
I'm talking long term. Right now, I...
Interesting economic paper on the limits of bitcoin:
The amount of computational power devoted to anonymous, decentralized blockchains such as Bitcoin’s must simultaneously satisfy two conditions in equilibrium: (1) a zero-profit condition among miners, who engage in a rent-seeking competition...
I'm wondering what is happening to all these bitcoins drug cartels made along with hackers? Do they just convert their bitcoins to gold or some other valuable commodity and then to cash and then launder via traditional methods?
Any ideas?
How liquid are bitcoins and other crypto-currencies ? (i.e. How easy is it exchange them for normal currencies or for goods and services?)
For example, in the USA, a person with foreign coins (of the physical variety) can't go into a typical bank and exchange them for US currency. Is getting...
How many of you support that alternate currency? Do you have some bitcoins and if yes do you spend it?
Personally i have few coins and I am waiting to get on right price. It is investing for me.
Hi all!
I'm a new member and I hope I did everything right (in terms of formatting), given the "special" circumstance.
Since this isn't a textbook problem or anything, but instead is about a project of mine, I won't be using the provided format...
BITCOIN, “Heists, Thefts, Hacks, Scams, and Losses.”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/25/282384924/bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-goes-dark-after-theft-report
At least with Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar bills you had something to clean yourself with...
A nice article for laymen: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/
Original paper: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
One thing you will notice from reading the article is how terrible this protocol is for the environment!
Hi,
Not sure if this is the right place to post this but...
I understand that D-Wave has a developed an adiabetic quantum computer. Google and Lockheed Martin have both purchased these computers from D-Wave recently.
Could such a quantum computer (or perhaps future versions of it with...
t pretty rare that a brand new idea comes along and makes it big fast. It's exciting!
Edit by moderator - You've already posted in the current thread. https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=685768&page=4
I recently heard about bitcoin, but don't know that much about it. I read the Wikipedia article, but it wasn't particularly enlightening. What are the prospects of an alternate currency, like bitcoin, being viable. My guess is probably not much since it lacks the coercive power of a...