So what is bitcoin and, most importantly, should you put your money into it?
Bitcoin was created to work as peer-to-peer electronic cash. It’s not actual, physical money. Bitcoin transactions are public digital messages, signed by using cryptography, that are sent to the whole Bitcoin Network to be verified. The transactions are kept in a digital ledger called “the blockchain”.
As explained in a paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious supposed creator of bitcoin, an owner can transfer a bitcoin to another by “digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin.” To verify the transaction, a payee can verify the signatures to see the chain of ownership.
