What is Bitcoin ?
Introduction
A bit of imagination
Imagine yourself in the middle of a bank, this bank is called Bitcoin, there is no employee or boss just a lot of people like you, some have white helmets and some have orange helmets. You are there and the only thing you see is an unlimited number of transparent vaults through which you see the contents but to which you only have access with a private key.
In order to get a private key, you just have to create a vault, also you can create as many vaults as you want.
If you wish, you can wear the helmet of your choice.
The white helmet is also called validator and his role will be to check yourself whether the transactions are compliant or not. To become a white helmet, you simply need to have a hardware device which can run the Bitcoin software and therefore, a real-time copy of the blockchain.
The orange helmet, also known as a miner, is different since it must secure transactions. Because of their absolutely essential role, the orange helmets are getting paid. Every 10 minutes, a lottery is launched where all miners can play and win the reward. Rather than traditional gold mining, bitcoin miners compete with their computing power to find the number sequence. The winner gets the reward and the right to validate the next block of transactions on the blockchain.
The vaults in the bank are called wallets and when you add up the total content of these wallets, the amount can never exceed 21 million units because of the Bitcoin protocol and the fact that all members of the network have agreed on this rule. In fact, the rewards of miners is divided by two for every 210,000 validated transaction blocks, this happens more or less every 4 years. It also means that the last bitcoin will approximately be mined in 2140. After this, the reward of miners will be the total transaction fees of the block.
