English Bahasa Indonesia Dansk Deutsch English Español Français Italiano Magyar Nederlands Polski Português Brasil Română Slovenščina Svenska Türkçe Ελληνικά български Русский Українська العربية فارسی हिन्दी 한국의 日本語 简体中文 繁體中文 Bahasa Indonesia Dansk Deutsch English Español Français Italiano Magyar Nederlands Polski Português Brasil Română Slovenščina Svenska Türkçe Ελληνικά български Русский Українська العربية فارسی हिन्दी 한국의 日本語 简体中文 繁體中文 Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money.Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network.

Bitcoin is open-source; its design is public, nobody owns or controls Bitcoin and everyone can take part.Through many of its unique properties, Bitcoin allows exciting uses that could not be covered by any previous payment system.LONDON -- An IT worker threw out a computer hard drive without realizing it contained $7.5 million worth of the digital currency Bitcoin.The device is now buried somewhere in a vast landfill site near the home of owner James Howells -- who only realized his mistake when it was too late."It is soul destroying to be honest,” Howells told NBC News on Thursday."I haven’t had much sleep over the past few days.Every second of the day I am thinking about what could have been."Howells, whose ordeal was first reported by the Guardian, worked out the hard drive would have been taken to a local landfill site and visited the dump to speak to the manager.But the hopelessness of his task became clear when he was was told that finding he disk would take weeks even with a team of a dozen people and backhoes.

"I had originally thought about raising money to hunt for the drive, but it was more an off-the-cuff idea.I know it’s gone," he said.Howells posted an image of the landfill site on Twitter.The hard drive is so valuable because it contains the key to 7,500 bitcoins, a currency which exists only in the digital world.The currency was created in 2009 and has recently skyrocketed in value -- hitting $1,000 per unit on Wednesday -- having enjoyed a surge in interest by the media and financial sector.ethereum rate coinbaseHowells, from Newport, in South Wales, created his 7,500 bitcoins in 2009, when the new currency was only known in niche circles and of little value.bitcoin crash tor"It was just after the financial crash and when I found out about Bitcoin it seemed to me to be the perfect alternative," he said.ubuntu bitcoin setup

"I knew it was going to be huge."The 28-year-old "mined" the currency by running a computer program on his Dell laptop for almost a week, eventually having to turn it off because his girlfriend complained the fans in the machine were getting too hot and noisy at night.Howells said he was forced to take the hard drive out of the laptop in 2010 when he poured a soft drink over the keyboard, and over the next three years it remained forgotten in his desk drawer.bitcoin chuck norrisHe does not know exactly when he threw it away, but said it was at some point this summer.litecoin jumpBitcoin's popularity had exploded into the mainstream.litecoin mining gpu vs cpuNorwegian investor Kristoffer Koch made about $800,000 when he bought $27 worth of bitcoins and forgot about them.

And before it was closed by the FBI in October the illegal online marketplace Silk Road used Bitcoin to trade goods including drugs and weapons.It was further pushed into the mainstream when Richard Branson announced this week that people would be able to pay for Virgin Galactic space flights using the currency.The first Bitcoin ATM machine opened in Vancouver, Canada, last month.Howells only realized what he had done last Friday."I started hearing all these stories about people making money from Bitcoin, and basically the penny just dropped and I remembered the bitcoins on the hard drive I had thrown away,” he said.“I have turned my house upside down looking for it, but I know deep down I threw it away."However, he refused to be too downbeat about the episode, and is now concentrating on the next opportunity the internet might bring."I am not about to jump off a bridge or anything," he said."There's always going to be another opportunity."You may have heard the term Bitcoin recently, maybe while surfing the Internet, from a friend or read about Bitcoins somewhere in the newspapers.

So what is Bitcoin and how do they work?Who is a Bitcoin miner or what is Bitcoin mining?How is the Bitcoin investment market?This post tries to touch upon these questions in brief.For those who do not know about Bitcoin, it is an electronic currency – not related or dependent on the currency of any country.Bitcoin (BTC) is a digital currency first described in a 2008 paper by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it an anonymous, peer-to-peer, electronic payments system.It uses the Blockchain Technology.What makes this Cryptocurrency more volatile is that unlike printed coins and bills, there is no physical entity to back it.For example, in many countries, bills are printed only up to a certain ratio of total exchangeable gold (or any other precious) metal available in that country.The image displayed is just for representation purpose; Bitcoins are not physical.Bitcoin can be created as and when necessary.That said, they are backed up by intangible computer resources in terms of both processor and storage.

The method of encryption used to secure bitcoin transactions employs heavy and lengthier encryptions and thus consumes considerable computer resources.It would not be wrong to say a transaction initiated using bitcoin or parts thereof depend upon the number of servers (or bitcoin miner as they are called) and the computing capacity of these servers.A new Bitcoin is relatively easy to handle compared to bitcoins that were already used for transactions.Each transaction adds a good amount of hashing, etc, related to previous transactions, to the bitcoin.Each new transaction would require the miners to first decode the coin and then append a larger sequence to the bitcoin.Thus, it becomes heavier.Considering it gold, assume that each time a bitcoin miner (server) receives a gold block (for example purpose) and decodes it, it also adds another layer of gold plating to it – thus making it heavier to an extent where the servers cannot handle the weight.Bitcoins too pass from the phase and at this point – where they become too large – the initial data is erased and the last ones are kept to consider previous successful transaction and then to work based on that.

The aim here is to keep the “weight” of bitcoins under a specific unit so that it does not crash the software engaged in mining.To casually define bitcoin mining process, it is the process of understanding whether the bitcoin is genuine i.e.being used legally – by decoding the previous transaction and comparing it to the log to see if they match.If they don’t, chances are: 1) either the server missed the log report broadcasted upon previous successful transaction or 2) the same bitcoin is being used for two different transactions at a time – in other words, an attempt to hack into bitcoin mining.All the above requires complex software.These are all open source software – the only requirement is that each of the bitcoin mining server should have compatible software to decode previous transaction, validate it and create a new, long hash for completing the current transaction.I used the word “long” here as in some cases, two or more miners may create hashes at same time and broadcast it to logs.

In this case, the coin having longer hash is considered – the one with shorter hash is discarded.It means that the transaction goes through and only the small hash is discarded.You may ask me about the incentives for people managing the TOR network.They do not get anything except a little satisfaction towards contributing to user privacy.But in that case, the system resources used are pretty low.If you use your computer as a TOR node, your computer will not slow down.It will simply receive a packet and forward it to another node in the TOR network.Coming to bitcoin mining, special software and good amount of computing resources are required.As long as there are new bitcoins being generated, the bitcoin miners get a good incentive for decoding and logging the transaction.In some cases, the people (users) who initiate transactions, also add transaction fee for the miners.Anything above the transaction value is kept by the bitcoin miner.This is good until a stage.There is a limit to the number of bitcoins that can be generated and to the rate of bitcoins generation.

It halves every four-year and ends at 2140.As of now, each ten minutes see 25 new bitcoins.Four years later, it will be 12.5 and again four years later it will be 6.25 and so on.This is something they’ve calculated based upon the current protocol and technology.12 million is the maximum number of Bitcoins that will be mined.Thus, the only incentive for miners is the amount they mine plus transaction fee if any.Considering this with gold again, you can mine and sell only up to whatever the mine holds.After you extract the complete mine, the only way you can make money is by using the fluctuations in the gold rates.That is why I said if you are a day trader, you can go for some quick profits.The rate of bitcoin is highly volatile dependent on several factors and one can make good money if she or he understands how it works.Unfortunately, like with other stocks, you cannot create a predictable graph that will trigger alarm to buy and sell.Some stock exchanges have incorporated bitcoin exchange as well so you might get a ticker on your computer that alarms you when the value of bitcoin goes up a little.

This bitcoin value monitoring software may be provided by the bitcoin exchange or you’ll have to create a custom one.It is easy – you just manipulate existing tickers and add bitcoin to it as you add any other currency.Read: Bitcoin vs Litecoin vs Dogecoin – Cryptocurrency compared.Right now, some entities are accepting bitcoins as valid currency to trade their goods.According to a few reports, most of such entities are gambling points and illegal drug selling entities.Some reputed institutions such as Wikileaks also accept bitcoins so that contributors can stay anonymous.There is no way any agency can track the sender unless the sender leaves a trail of similar sounding origin addresses.As of date, there are few bitcoin exchanges that convert bitcoins into real currency and a recent law has made such bitcoin exchanges accountable for registration and taxation.This trend can grow – creating easy conversion as well as good amount of taxation to discourage trading in bitcoins.If there are sufficient reasons to prove that a majority of bitcoin users are doing it for illegal reasons, such bitcoin exchanges may completely be closed in any country at short notice.