What Are Bitcoins? How Do Bitcoins Work?

Bitcoin – the initial virtual banking currency of the internet – has existed for several years now and many people have questions about them. Where do they come from? Are they legal? Where can you get them? Why did they split into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash? Here are the basics you need to know.

Cryptocurrency Defined

Cryptocurrencies are just lines of computer code that hold monetary value. Those lines of code are created by electricity and high-performance computers.

Cryptocurrency is also known as digital currency. Either way, it is a form of digital public money that is created by painstaking mathematical computations and policed by millions of computer users called 'miners'. Physically, there is nothing to hold.

'Crypto' comes from the word cryptography, the security process used to protect transactions that send the lines of code out for purchases. Cryptography also controls the creation of new 'coins', the term used to describe specific amounts of code.

Governments have no control over the creation of cryptocurrencies, which is what initially made them so popular. Most cryptocurrencies begin with a market cap in mind, which means that their production will decrease over time thus, ideally, making any particular coin more valuable in the future.

What Are Bitcoins?

Bitcoin was the first cryptocoin currency ever invented. No one knows exactly who created it – cryptocurrencies are designed for maximum anonymity – but bitcoins first appeared in 2009 from a developer supposedly named Satoshi Nakamoto.

He has since disappeared and left behind a Bitcoin fortune.

Because Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to exist, all digital currencies created since then are called Altcoins, or alternative coins. Litecoin, Peercoin, Feathercoin, Ethereum and hundreds of other coins are all Altcoins because they are not Bitcoin.

One of the advantages of Bitcoin is that it can be stored offline on a person's local hardware. That process is called cold storage and it protects the currency from being taken by others. When the currency is stored on the internet somewhere (hot storage), there is high risk of it being stolen.

On the flip side, if a person loses access to the hardware that contains the bitcoins, the currency is simply gone forever. It's estimated that as much as $30 billion in bitcoins have been lost or misplaced by miners and investors. Nonetheless, Bitcoins remain incredibly popular as the most famous cryptocurrency over time.