How to buy Bitcoin?
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What is Bitcoin
Bitcoin is digital money. Physically, this currency does not exist, there are only special registries that keep records of how many bitcoins someone has and who transfers them to where. These logs are called blockchains.

This is similar to how non-cash payments are arranged in banks: when you pay with a card in a store, you also do not transfer any physical money or gold to anyone. It's just that your operation is registered somewhere in the bank register.

Bitcoins differ from conventional currency in that registries are not stored centrally in banks and payment systems, but simultaneously on all computers that are occupied by bitcoins. Anyone can view all transactions with all bitcoins in the entire history.

Registries are protected by cryptography. You can't fake them all at the same time. It is impossible to rewrite the data in blocks and declare that someone now has millions. Bitcoin is quite secure in this sense. However, there is already an attack that allows you to pay with the same bitcoins twice, so it is impossible to say that bitcoin is absolutely safe.

Where do Bitcoins come from
The usual currency is issued by the state. It is very indirectly connected with gold reserves, but in fact it is not connected with anything — as much as the state needs, so much it will print.

Bitcoins are not associated with any one state. New units of bitcoin appear in the process of how computers in this payment network serve the needs of the same network.

For example, somewhere in China, a person paid with bitcoins for pizza. This operation must be recorded in the registers on all computers that are connected to the bitcoin network. To record an operation in the registry, you need to seal it with a special signature, like a sealing wax seal. This signature needs to be calculated, it is a complex computer task.

Somewhere in Venezuela there is a computer that serves the bitcoin network. He just figured out this cryptographic signature. As a token of gratitude, the owner of this computer receives a reward in the form of a bitcoin penny.

For a Venezuelan who has installed a computer in the mode of calculating cryptographic signatures, it looks like this: his computer is rustling something there, and bitcoin pennies are dripping into his account. The computer seems to be mining bitcoins, although in fact it simply encrypts and seals other people's operations. This kind of "mining" of bitcoins is called mining.

In fact, it is not the bitcoins themselves that are mined, but "sealing wax" to protect registries. Bitcoins are a reward for service.

The number of bitcoins is limited — there can be a maximum of 21,000,000. In the summer of 2020, miners mined about 90% of the coins.

Mining is a separate big topic. In a nutshell: the equipment is expensive, the efficiency is low, you will have to compete with megawatt Chinese mining clusters that are built on the basis of power plants. We wrote a separate article about mining and published a reader's story.
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