Bitcoin same wallet multiple computers
On May 4, the No. 98 car took to the track at Talladega for the Aaron’s 499 NASCAR race covered in pictures of — a dog?
Close, but the Shiba Inu in this particular picture is from a meme officially referred to as “Doge, ” and the car was wrapped in livery featuring Dogecoin, the Internet’s newest cryptocurrency, a form of digital currency that relies on advanced cryptography for security.
On the recently canceled Fox show Almost Human, today’s most successful cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, got a nod every few episodes as pop culture’s pick for the future of money. While these recent introductions into the zeitgeist are an indicator that cryptocurrency is gaining a foothold in the public consciousness, the decision by the Federal Election Commission on May 8 to allow Bitcoin for campaign contributions is an indicator that cryptocurrency is gaining true legitimacy.
With the rise of the Internet and the ability to conduct global transactions in fractions of a second, it seems inevitable that a worldwide, all-digital currency would emerge. The idea of a “new form of money that uses cryptography to control its creation and transactions, rather than a central authority, ” was floated as far back as 1998, but it gained steam with a proof-of-concept publication in 2009, according to the Bitcoin.org website. Today, the equivalent value of the total Bitcoins in circulation is nearly $6 billion U.S. dollars. That’s no small change.
“Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency that uses a distributed public ledger and cryptography to allow for verifiable proof of ownership across multiple intermediaries, ” said Lexington’s Lamar Wilson, co-owner of 212ths.com and Love Will, Inc., and one of the designers behind Pheeva, a multiplatform Bitcoin wallet. “In a nutshell, Bitcoin is the Internet of money.”
Unlike with government-backed fiat money, Bitcoins aren’t poured or printed in a mint. They aren’t created entirely out of thin air, either, and the technical aspects of their creation and circulation can be somewhat staggering to consider.
“Bitcoins are created through a process called mining, ” said Wilson. “Mining uses the computational power of many distributed computers … to find consensus for the confirmation of transactions waiting to be verified. Once the miner verifies the transaction block, it is rewarded with Bitcoins.”
After Bitcoins are in circulation, parties use special wallets with a private key to transact with others, and all transactions are cleared on a public ledger called a block chain, the integrity and order of which is enforced with cryptography.
