Since Bitcoin was frequently reported by the news media, my mom also ran to ask me what Bitcoin is. A few days ago, through an interesting example, it took 10 minutes for my mom to understand.
I believe the following content can help you quickly understand what Bitcoin is, and can be popularized to friends and family around you, even the aunt and aunt can understand.
Bitcoin is actually very simple, but now it is often the technical staff who understand Bitcoin. They are used to speaking in terms of technical terms. When a few terms are thrown out, the audience is "stunned".
This "stun" audience-style approach generally begins with this:
Bitcoin is a digital currency in the form of P2P. Peer-to-peer transmission means a decentralized payment system. Unlike most currencies, Bitcoin does not rely on a specific currency institution to issue, it is generated by a large number of calculations according to a specific algorithm. The Bitcoin economy uses a distributed database of nodes in the entire P2P network to confirm and record all transaction behaviors. And use cryptography to ensure the security of all aspects of currency circulation.
This explanation does not say that aunt and aunt, as long as it is not a computer professional, afraid that even the doctor can not understand it!
So, if the grandfathers who danced in the square dance came to ask what Bitcoin is, how can we explain it to them?
Assume that the square dance club encourages everyone to dance more. It is stipulated that each time you add 2 points, you will not deduct 3 points for no reason, and the lead dance will add 1 point. The change of points is recorded by the club's Wang Ayi. Points can be exchanged for prizes such as peanut oil at the end of the year.
In fact, in real life, the duties of the bank and the duties of Aunt Wang are the same - they are all bookkeeping (only the aunt Wang is the points, the bank is the money). Was paid, the bank added 2000 yuan to your account; bought a bottle of shampoo minus 20 yuan; deposit a year plus interest of 100 yuan; transfer is to reduce 1000 in your account, add 1000 to the other account...
But the biggest difference between the bank and Wang Ayi is that Aunt Wang is free to serve everyone. The bank has to ask us to collect money, card fees, annual fees, transfer fees... See how many high-rise buildings and how many banks are employed. The employee knows how much the bank has collected us.
If one day we don’t want the bank or Aunt Wang’s account, can it be achieved?
Of course, Bitcoin is like this.
We can think of people who use Bitcoin as a member of a square dance club. The points for this club are set as follows:
- The initial score of each person (that is, Bitcoin) is 0;
- The people in the community jointly maintain a ledger, and the account book is updated every 10 minutes, regardless of changes, and the community owner is notified after the update;
- Anyone in the community has the right to book, as long as the bookkeeping, you can get 50 bitcoin rewards (half every four years, now 12.5 bitcoins);
- All the people who want to book the accounts must count the same math problem. The first person who is correct is eligible to keep accounts;
- The upper limit of Bitcoin is 21 million.
The process of getting the bookkeeping right to get the bitcoin reward is called mining.
Initially Bitcoin was of little value, and only his inventor, Nakamoto, was willing to mine. After Zhong Bencong dug more than 1 million bitcoins, he finally began to join the mining team. Later, some physical stores, websites, etc. began accepting bitcoin payments. People’s demand for bitcoin is getting bigger and bigger, and bitcoin is getting more and more valuable.
A little deeper, we can understand several important features of Bitcoin:
Decentralization. Instead of relying on any central accounting, all people can work together to maintain a book, and anyone can rob the book.
can not be tampered with. Each block is time stamped, and all the blocks are connected to the previous block. Once you want to change the data in the block, the timestamp will not be correct; and everyone in the club is staring, thinking At least half of the people who are tampering are willing to "refer to the deer as a horse" with you.
Open and transparent. The current account of any account can be found on the blockchain. When you transfer money to someone else, don't worry that the other party has received the money and don't accept it. The blockchain will remember it clearly.
Internationalization. Because Bitcoin only exists on the Internet, if you want to transfer, pay, or buy Bitcoin, you only need to operate online. From the download data of Bitcoin wallet, more than 200 countries around the world are using bitcoin, which is more international than the US dollar and RMB.
anti-inflation. There is no upper limit on the total amount of legal currency in each country. The government prints a large amount of money every year. The upper limit of Bitcoin is 21 million. No one can change it.
Having said that, we might as well try to calculate the price of Bitcoin. Because the price is determined by value, the more people use Bitcoin, the higher the price. How many people are using Bitcoin? Because Bitcoin is an anonymous currency, we can only speculate on the number of Bitcoin addresses:
● January 2009: single digits
● May 2012: 1.85 million
● Early 2015: 6 million
● May 2016: 12 million
● October 2018: 22.37 million
Contrast: Alipay's user base is 1 billion, and it is expected to reach 2 billion in the next 10 years. Do you think Bitcoin users will have the same growth space as Alipay users in the future? If so, what kind of things will happen?