Bitcoin in 2 minutes
(Or at least i try)
*disclaimer at the bottom of the page*
Bitcoin is a digital payment system invented in 2008 by an anonymous programmer with the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto.
With Bitcoin capitalized means the protocol, or the technology behind it, with tiny bitcoins identifying the actual digital currency.
Why Bitcoin?
The idea behind Bitcoin was to be able to give the possibility of an electronic money totally managed by the individual without a third party fiduciaria that was interposed between users (Bank) and that was regulated and managed by mathematics. This concept is very important to explain the existence of Bitcoin: do you trust more than one person or a mathematical algorithm?
How it work?
Nakamoto to propose his version of digital currency had first to solve problems that the nature of digitalization gave: being totally virtual and not bound to something physical made Bitcoin duplicable and insecure.
Another problem was represented by the very nature that Bitcoin had to have: it had to be decentralized, so unlike a legal currency like the euro or the dollar, there should not be a public or private body that could control it. Bitcoin had to be equal: redistribute control and consensus among all the participants in this network.
It has therefore resorted to existing technologies to overcome these problems:
To decentralize his project he relied on P2P technology, literally «from node to node», a protocol that does not provide neither server nor client, but information shared among all the participants of a network.
How, however, to make sure information owned by everyone is secure? This is how Nakamoto resorted to cryptography, a branch of computer science and mathematics able to hide (encrypt) a message and make it read (decrypt) only to the true recipient.
Decentralized thanks to P2P and secure thanks to the Cryptography, there remained only the problem of duplicability: every digital object can easily be «copied and pasted» as you can well imagine. Nakamoto then exploited the technology of distributed databases by implementing what in the end is the structure on which Bitcoin is based: the Blockchain! A chain of information blocks linked to each other in an indissoluble way (hashing deepen) in a timeless sequence (timestamp approfondisci) incontrovertible. More simply, the Blockchain is:
«A distributed system for recording immutable information»
Bitcoin is then exchanged in these blocks of information that represent transactions from user to user, decreeing, in this specific case, the immutable transfer of information, a user can therefore spend or transfer them only if he received them from someone else, and here that duplicability is effectively rendered impossible.
This series of blocks is recorded in a database that is distributed among all the nodes that are part of it (P2P), and the whole is protected by the Cryptography.
Nakamoto has decided to take all these technologies, create Bitcoin around and pack everything in a gift bag with the words: OPEN SOURCE! It gave all the developers of this network the chance to improve it democratically, making it one of the biggest collective projects of all time.
An infallible system: after almost 10 years Bitcoin has never been hacked, becoming the most resilient network in the world and probably the safest place to keep your money.
Disclaimer: This article is aimed at a public neophyte and has no specific ambition, it is my way to explain Bitcoin in 2 minutes to those who do not know it completely.
For criticisms and comments: danilogiudice@etnachain.it
Thanks to: Bitcoin Pesaro Urbino for having stimulated the idea, Marco Crotta of Blockchain Caffè for having corrected my definition of Blockchain during a workshop in Catania; the definition is found in this article.
