Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency

Bitcoin logo

Beschreibung

• Bitcoin (BTC) ist die bekannteste Kryptowährung.
• Die digitale Währung wurde im Januar 2009 nach dem Zusammenbruch des Immobilienmarktes geschaffen.
• Sie folgt den Ideen, die der geheimnisvolle und pseudonyme Satoshi Nakamoto in einem Weißbuch dargelegt hat.
• Bitcoin is administered through a decentralized peer-to-peer network
• Bitcoins are issued according to rules agreed to by the majority of the computing power within the Bitcoin network. The core rules describing the predictable issuance of bitcoins to its verifying servers, a voluntary and competitive transaction fee system and the hard limit of no more than BTC 21 million issued in total.
• Bitcoin is open source.

Einheiten

Einheit	Entpricht
1 BTC	1.000 mBTC
1 mBTC	1.000 bits
1 bit	100 satoshi
1 BTC	100.000.000 satoshi

Blockchain

Blockchain is a chain of blocks that contain user transactions. The trick is that they cannot be mixed, deleted or edited because all of them are connected to each other, so any interference is excluded. The founder of Binance even once said that its influence on the world will be greater than that of the Internet.

Transactions

• Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.
• All transactions are visible on the blockchain and can be viewed using a hex editor. The Blockchain Browser is a site where every transaction included in the blockchain can be viewed in a human-readable way. This is useful for viewing the technical details of transactions in action and for verifying payments.

Mining

Mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions (and a "mining rig" is a colloquial metaphor for a single computer system that performs the necessary computations for "mining". This ledger of past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks. The blockchain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place. Bitcoin nodes use the blockchain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.

Mining has two goals:

• Set the transaction history in such a way that it is computationally impossible to change it by any single entity.
• Introduction of bitcoins into the system: miners are paid any transaction fees, as well as a reward for the created coins.

Difficulty

Mining a block is difficult because the SHA-256 hash of a block's header must be lower than or equal to the target in order for the block to be accepted by the network. This problem can be simplified for explanation purposes: The hash of a block must start with a certain number of zeros. The probability of calculating a hash that starts with many zeros is very low, therefore many attempts must be made. In order to generate a new hash each round, a nonce is incremented.

The difficulty is automatically adjusting every 2016 blocks (two-week adjustment period) to the total performance of devices in the network to ensure that network participants find a new block with a period of about 10 minutes.

Reward

• When a block is discovered, the discoverer may award themselves a certain number of bitcoins, which is agreed-upon by everyone in the network and this value will halve every 210,000 blocks.
• Currently the Reward Era is 4 and the reward is 6.25 BTC per block

Wallet

Types of BTC wallet

Paper

Since your cryptocurrency account is, roughly speaking, your private and public keys, the easiest way to save them is to write them down on a piece of paper. This will be the paper wallet. But in a paper wallet, cryptocurrency can only be stored. To pay for something, you will have to create a different type of wallet and transfer funds from a paper wallet to a new one. Due to the low reliability of manual input, you can use a QR code instead.

Software(Hot)

The easiest e-wallets to use are the hot ones. They are served by various online services and you can use money anywhere and from any device - you just need an Internet connection. To start a hot wallet, you just need to register on the service website or install a special program - and you will be able to manage your digital savings through the interface.

Hot wallets are very convenient, but when you use them, you trust all the money in your account to an online service. For example, cryptocurrency exchanges offer clients hot wallets for every cryptocurrency they trade, but recent experience shows that keeping a lot of money in such wallets is not very smart: exchanges are a tasty morsel for hackers. Some specialized hot wallet services do not trade cryptocurrencies and pay more attention to security, but still work with them is based solely on trust.

Some hot wallet services allow you to see your keys and store them somewhere else, others do not. In the second case, if something happens to the service, most likely you will have to say goodbye to your hard-earned money. And in the first - you can always switch to another wallet. Hot wallets are good for storing small amounts that you plan to spend.

Examples of hot wallets:

• Blockchain.com
• Coinbase

Software

Unlike hot wallets that run in the cloud, software reside on your device but are connected to the internet. A software or mobile wallet is a utility installed on a computer, smartphone or any other device that stores public and private keys and processes transactions.

In addition, they often have many more features than other types of wallets, such as the Lightning instant transaction technology of the Electrum wallet, the CoinJoin anonymous transaction technology of the Wasabi wallet, and many others.

"Thick"

This type of wallet provides for downloading the entire amount of the blockchain (at the time of writing this is 398.80GB). Their advantage is high reliability, because trust in third parties is reduced to a minimum.

Examples of thick wallets:

• Bitcoin Core

"Thin"

"Thin" bitcoin wallets provide for downloading only the last part of the blockchain. Thanks to this, you save space on your device (and on mobile devices, downloading and storing a blockchain larger than 398 GB is not possible), plus you gain performance. These wallets provide for the storage of keys on your device, usually in encrypted form. Blockchain and transactions are synchronized with the server. In general, they are safer than hot wallets and provide the ability to interact with the wallet file.

Examples of thin wallets:

• Electrum
• Wasabi Wallet

Links

Weblinks

1. https://www.blockchaincenter.net/rechner/
2. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
3. https://blockchain.info/
4. https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/
5. https://de.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hauptseite
6. https://www.blockchaincenter.net/bitcoin/
7. https://bitcoin-2go.de/krypto-boersen-vergleich/
8. https://www.bestchange.com/
9. https://exchange.mercuryo.io/

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