What is Bitcoin definition ?

     If you bought a single bitcoin a year ago you would've paid just under $1000 for it. However, if you wanna sell that same Bitcoin value today it is worth over $17,000. Which really begs the question, what exactly is a bitcoin? The idea is that this is a virtual currency that isn't backed by anything physical. It's important to know that this isn't a stock. It is a currency. Now mind you, it's a little bit different than something like a U.S. dollar, or a euro, or the yen, which are all backed by specific countries. But the same idea still applies here. And the maintenance reason why bitcoin is skyrocketing in value is because everyone wants to get their hands on them. So how does this all actually work? Well, unlike something like cash, which is printed by a government and I can hold it in my hand, bitcoin relies on something called "the blockchain".

A simple way to understand this is to imagine a ledger. Every time anyone buys or sells anything related to bitcoin is recorded in this ledger called "the blockchain" and then it is copied hundreds of thousands of times every single hour across multiple computers to make sure that everyone is on the exact same page. What makes this interesting is the idea that because it is copied across all these different computers and because it all is public, have any at all? Well, the blockchain actually does a really good job of protecting against this.Because that ledger and that list of transactions is copied across so many computers, it's updated multiple times per hour.

How to set up a bitcoin mining system ?

Essentially, every single time that you help process a transaction and make sure that it's legit you mine what is a very, very tiny amount of bitcoin. If you were lucky enough to mine bitcoin in the early days and held on to what you mined, you'd become a very, very rich person today. However, in 2017, if you wanna set up a bitcoin mining system it really doesn't make a lot of sense. Bitcoin mining used to work best on PC graphics cards, which were originally meant for gaming, can actually do this kind of stuff fairly well. However, nowadays ASICs have completely destroyed that market. And ASIC is essentially a small computer that its sole purpose in life is to mine bitcoin. And when it does it does it a lot faster than your actual computer which makes it totally obsolete.

Now even though it's not profitable to mine bitcoin anymore there are other types of crypto currencies that you can actually some money on if you have a pretty decent PC and then trade those into bitcoin. By far, the easiest way of getting your hands on bitcoin is to simply buy them. But this is where I have to be very, very clear, this is not a normal investment. Not only does it just go up and down, but it goes wildly up and wildly down.

So if you do decide to put money into bitcoin, please keep in mind this is a super risky investment. And that, honestly, it could all disappear at any minute. Hopefully it won't but just be careful. Prices really are wildly variable on bitcoin right now.

The advantage with Coinbase is, is not only do they give you a wallet to store it in but you can also purchase bitcoin from them as well as some other crypto currencies such as Litecoin and Ethereum, which is the other two major ones right now. Alright, so after this long and arduous journey we finally have our bitcoin. However, what can we actually do with it? So some stores will actually allow you to buy things with bitcoin.

However, the vast majority of people are using it as more of an investment. So you can buy some here, hope that the price goes up and then turn around and sell it later. However, it's not all just digital. So there are some bitcoin ATMs that you can go to in the real world, put your wallet information in and withdraw or deposit into them .