#-What is Bitcoin?**
To those who don’t know what Bitcoin is, Bitcoin is a Peer-2-Peer technology that doesn’t have a central authority or bank. To manage transactions and issuing of Bitcoin is up to the people of the community, like you and me. Its open source which means that no one controls it and everyone can contribute to helping it or partaking in it.
**#-Wallets.****
For you to be able to use Bitcoin you have to have what is called a wallet. It tracks all the Bitcoin transactions and tacks where it goes. Using this reasoning Bitcoin is NOT anonymous but more on that later. To send or receive Bitcoins you need to make a “wallet address,” that would basically be a home address to be able to receive letters in the mail. To make a Bitcoin address you need to go to File->Receiving Addresses->New->Then label that address. It will then generate a useable address under that label. (It is best to have a different address for each transaction because it will be able to see where your Bitcoins are coming from.)
There are many different types of wallets depending on if you want to use it on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, BlackBerry, or IOS. After choosing which wallet is best for you download it and install it. After you boot it up the first time it will make the necessary files and then sync with the Bitcoin Network. This will take a very long time to do but after that you can send and receive Bitcoin.
**#-Bitcoin’s Price****
Bitcoin’s price varies. This means that when you buy Bitcoin it may be worth a different amount when you sell it or donate it. The rise and fall of what Bitcoin is worth kind of works like the stock market with the way it goes up in price and falls down in price (I do not know the exact working of why this happens). One day the Bitcoin community wishes that it won’t fluctuate at all but until that day comes it is NOT recommended that you save very many funds in your wallets and only buy when you need them.
**#-Getting Bitcoin****
To be able to get Bitcoin you have to buy it with real money, gifted it, or earned it buy mining it (Mining Bitcoin will not get you very many Bitcoins anymore without high-end equipment. Mining Bitcoin, at its most basic form, is renting out your hardware to do lengthy equations to determine transactions and other things that I won’t be going over in this guide.) Easiest way to get Bitcoin is buy it from an “exchange” that will exchange Bitcoin for actual money. There are many exchanges that you can go through to get Bitcoin but that is a topic for another day. They are relatively straight forward so I have confidence that all you Voats can figure out how to do that on your own. If not I may be able to help some on how to go about using some exchanges.
**#-Sending Bitcoin****
This is Voat.co’s Bitcoin address: “1PhBpbED6uEnrvy5s9F9axBZbK8fWAezdc” (without the quotation marks.) If you copy and paste that while sending bitcoin to it then the funds (after a couple of hours) will be send to Voat’s admins and be able to put towards running the server and hopefully one day it’s staff. To be able to send Bitcoin, to say Voat, you will go under the “send” tab then enter the address that you wish to send Bitcoin too, enter the amount, and then hit send. Sending Bitcoin is irreversible and will take a fee. If you accidentally send Bitcoin to a wrong Bitcoin address then you are out of luck because you cannot get any of those Bitcoins back.
If I have anything (more than likely) wrong here please tell me and I can edit the post :)
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compaioncube ago
For any cryptocurrency you will need a wallet. You can safely download a wallet from https://bitco.in/en/choose-your-wallet and you can also download the one that I use for this how to from this wedsite. The fee is very small, from what I'm seeing it is .00002461 of a Bitcoin which is about $.06 cents. The transaction fee goes to the miner who mines the block that includes your transaction. When I say block I mean a block of equations that your transaction is in. Litecoin all has the same basic concepts that Bitcoin does but isn't as widely used yet and one "coin" doesn't cost as much.
ScottRockview ago
Is there a way one could do their own mining? That is to say, block others from mining the transaction so your computer does it and then you save the fee?
go1dfish ago
Let me clarify that a bit, what you could do is if you were a solo miner miner you could queue up transactions and choose to include them in preference to other transactions in blocks that you end up mining even though they don't include fees.
The block reward (that is the financial incentive for mining, and a success) is 12 bitcoin, or roughly $32,400 right now.
That doesn't include any transaction fees that happen to be in the block. So yes, when that happens you can include your transactions for free but you probably don't care too much because you're making serious bank anyway.
A block reward happens roughly every 10 minutes and it pretty random which miner gets it, solo mining is not viable for bitcoin anymore and that's why people use pools.
go1dfish ago
No, mining is similar to a lottery entered with computing power and it would require enormous nation-state level resources to ensure you were the miner that mined any given transaction.