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Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies – what digital money really means for our future

In a word, yes. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, and is still the biggest, but in the eight years since it was created pretenders to the throne have come along.

All of them have the same basic underpinnings: they use a “blockchain”, a shared public record of transactions, to create and track a new type of digital token – one that can only be made and shared according to the agreed-upon rules of the network, whatever they may be. But the flourishing ecosystem has provided a huge amount of variation on top of that.

Some cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin or Dogecoin, fulfil the same purpose as bitcoin – building a new digital currency – with tweaks to some of the details (making transactions faster, for instance, or ensuring a basic level of inflation).

Others, such as Ethereum or Bat, take the same principle but apply it to a specific purpose: cloud computing or digital advertising in the case of those two.

What exactly is a bitcoin? Can I hold one?

A bitcoin doesn’t really exist as a concrete physical – or even digital – object. If I have 0.5 bitcoins sitting in my digital wallet, that doesn’t mean there is a corresponding other half sitting somewhere else.


Source :- theguardian

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