What is Bitcoin and How it Works

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. It allows you to move money without being traced because all transactions are anonymous. Bitcoins are just lines of computer code that hold monetary value. Those lines of code are created by electricity and computers. Bitcoin was the first crypto coin currency ever invented. Bitcoin’s “creator” is known as Satoshi Nakamoto. They have never been identified.

Bitcoin can be used to buy things electronically. The Bitcoin idea was to produce a currency independent of any central authority, transferable electronically, more or less instantly, with very low transaction fees.

How a Bitcoin Transaction Works

If Alice sends some bitcoins to Bob, that transaction will have three pieces of information:

• An input. This is a record of which bitcoin address was used to send the bitcoins to Alice in the first place (she received them from her friend, Eve).
• An amount. This is the amount of bitcoins that Alice is sending to Bob.
• An output. This is Bob's bitcoin address.

How to sent Bitcoin

To send bitcoins, you need two things: a bitcoin address and a private key. A bitcoin address is generated randomly and is simply a sequence of letters and numbers. The private key is another sequence of letters and numbers, but unlike your bitcoin address, this is kept secret.

When Alice wants to send bitcoins to Bob, she uses her private key to sign a message with the input (the source transaction(s) of the coins), amount, and output (Bob’s address).

She then sends them from her bitcoin wallet out to the wider bitcoin network. From there, bitcoin miners verify the transaction, putting it into a transaction block and eventually solving it.