Bitcoin for dummies
Everybody’s writing and talking about them: so let’s #discoverbitcoin with the Discover Bitcoin team by Luiss.
It goes without saying that on a site of a project about Bitcoin an article describing what it is cannot be missing. After all, this is one of our goals: helping people, who have no idea what Bitcoin is, understand the phenomenon, starting from the basis. And if you, my reader, are well knowledgeable about the subject, I hope you’ll bear with me and enjoy a brief refresh of basic concepts. As the title says, this article is about Bitcoin for dummies. I mean no offense whatsoever with it. The point is that Bitcoin is an extremely complex phenomenon, starting especially from its mechanics. Behind them, there is this brilliant algorithm, and giving a detailed explanation of it would require a high level of competence in mathematics, cryptography and informatics, which not everyone possesses. I, myself, am an economist, so I am not exactly the most suited person to lead you through its more insidious technicalities. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that we can’t understand the Bitcoin protocol at all. On the contrary, keeping things fairly simple and intuitive, we will be able to provide ourselves with the understanding, necessary to be able to form our own and, most importantly, aware and autonomous opinion on the subject. Before I further proceed with my explanation, I’d like to clarify some notation: when I write Bitcoin, with a capital “b” I mean the project, the protocol, the whole phenomenon; when I write bitcoin with a small “b”, I am referring to the coins in particular.
First of all, Bitcoin is a virtual currency, it doesn’t exist physically: every coin is a string of numbers generated inside a computer. More specifically, as you may have heard, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. This means that all its mechanism heavily relies on cryptography to work properly. The Bitcoin protocol was created by Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows who he is, this at least untill few days ago, when some reporters claimed to have found him in Temple City, California: a certain Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64 year-old physicist. It still has to be proved, thogh. In fact, the most accredited opinion is that the name is just a pseudonym (not his real one) to hide the true identity of Bitcoin’s father, probably more than one, given the tremendous complexity of the Bitcoin algorithm. After publishing an introductory paper on Bitcoin in 2008 — Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System — and launching the protocol online in 2009, Nakamoto completely vanished into thin air. His mysterious figure and possible identity are still object of fervid discussions.
Nakamoto’s paper is indeed an excellent starting point to define Bitcoin.
Follow us in the next blogpost we are going to publish to read the rest of the article written by Annalaura Ianiro.
Blogpost written by the members of the team Discover Bitcoin by Luiss. This blog is written by the members of the FBDA / GROUP team and its partners. Learn more on www.fbdagroup.org.
