A Very Basic Introduction to Bitcoin (bitcoin)

submitted ago by compaioncube

#-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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ScottRockview ago

Are there any versions of crypto currency that don't have fees associated with them? It just seems like a slap in the face to go out in the real world, earn money, pay tax on it, then convert that after tax money into something that fluctuates AND have to pay a fee to do so, and another fee to gift money to someone. I am able to find ways to convert currency without any overages and just pay what the market rate is that day, and I can give that real currency to whoever I want to without a fee.

EngelbertHumperdinck ago

Part of the function of crypto miners is to verify transactions. The fees are there to pay for that service. The only reason bitcoin fees are so high at the moment is because there is a conspiracy to keep the block size restricted at 1MB. The block size limits how many transactions can fit into a block. Because the user base is growing and blocks haven't been allowed to scale, only transactions with higher fees are making it into blocks. This may all be resolved in the future with a change to the protocol. Other cryptocurrencies do not have this problem, and thus, their fees are lower.

Also, the price of everything fluctuates, even government fiat. Everything on earth is valued in terms of something else. If you value dollars in terms of some commodity, then you'll see the dollar fluctuating as well.