Currency that the people control. No government involvement, no physical money. This is the wave of the future and will make a huge advantage for travelers. The ease on knowing that your money won’t get stolen?!! That is a great comfort. So we here at My Travel Money find it particularly important that you understand and learn exactly how to buy bitcoins so you yourself will have that comfort. So let’s talk about digital currency.
In the year 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous developer, introduced a peer-to-peer digital currency and payment network, which had public transaction log. These digital currencies and payment network is what is called bitcoin and is sometimes referred to as crypto-currency, mainly because it utilizes public-key cryptography. The introduction of bitcoin was marred by many hitches such the 2009 exploit that led to development of unlimited bitcoin.
Since their introduction, bitcoin has experienced rapid appreciation in value in relation to some of the world’s highly recognized digital currencies such as the American dollar, the British pound, and the euro. Precisely, in 2011 the value of bitcoin was equal to around $32 and $0.30. However, this value later fell to as low as $2.
Three years after introduction, which is in 2012, people learned how to buy bitcoins and it began to get attention from the media. Many articles and news items were then written about bitcoin. This rising popularity, would later in the year 2013 lead to the acceptance of this currency by some of the mainstream services like Foodler, Humble Bundle, Baidu and OkCupid. In the same year, bitcoin experienced the first legal intervention by law enforcement. The assets of Mt. Gox were seized. In addition, this lawful intervention also saw the shutdown of the Silk Road drugs marketplace, in the same year.
During the month of November 2013, there was a major take-over with Europe based Bitstamp and japan based Mt. Gox bitcoin being overtaken by BTC china to become the biggest bitcoin trading exchange through trade volume.
Towards the end of the year 2013, bitcoin received a major setback when the Chinese government banned its banks from using bitcoin in all their transactions within the borders of the country. However, the citizens had the free will of using the bitcoin in transactions in the country. This action led to a fall in the value of bitcoin in china as the new rules could not warrant the exchange of bitcoin for the country’s local currency.
Transactions with bitcoin are not like the normal currency transactions, as with bitcoin, there is actually no real exchange between the buyer and the seller that takes place. Instead, the buyer does what is known as blockchain, which is the requesting of an update to a given public transaction log. The blockchain shows what people currently own including what they owned in the past in terms of bitcoin and it is managed by a decentralized network system that ascertains and time-stamps payments by using a proof-of-work system. The people who manage this system are commonly known as ‘miner’ and they are paid with newly minted bitcoin and transaction fees.
Because of the close ties between bitcoin and fraud, bitcoin have had to be subjected to forensic scrutiny by many nations that accept their use within their borders. This process has led to divergent opinions regarding the usage of bitcoin by different states. For instance, The Federal Government of America is the only government that has taken positives in using bitcoin and allowed free usage of the currency by its citizens. However, other governments such as the Chinese government has barred its private banks from using bitcoin in all transactions and the European banking authority has cautioned that bitcoin is not worth transacting with as it lacks consumer protection.
Bitcoin can be used for payment of goods and services in the countries that accept it. The advantage of using it is that the transaction fees are relatively smaller than the high percentages around 2% and 3% that are imposed on processing a credit card. Some of the merchants accepting the use of bitcoin include; WordPress, OkCupid, Virgin Galastic and Reddit.
If you would like to learn more, which we suggest you do, visit http://howtomakemoneywithbitcoin.net/. It’s the way of the future so go learn how to buy those bitcoins for yourself!
