Lars holdgaard bitcoin exchange rates
So if Jane buys milk from Jason and pays with Bitcoin, this is stored in the system. And it will be stored forever. Since every single transaction is stored, and everyone can see them, we always know how many Bitcoin everyone has. The thing they transfer is called Bitcoins. This is very simplified what Bitcoin is: The way the blockchain work is that when you make a transaction, you store it in a block together with other transactions.
This will create 4 transactions because each of you just bought a Mai Tai cocktail. These 4 transactions are all put together in a block.
Every ten minutes, the Bitcoin system will take all transactions made in the last ten minutes. Then this block is attached to what we call the blockchain. When the block is attached, your transaction is stored forever and added to the blockchain. This is a decision made in Bitcoin, and other alternatives have picked a different time than ten minutes.
Does it mean I can only do one transaction every ten minutes? Can I run this on a smartphone? In theory, but you are going to actually use Bitcoin through user-friendly websites and apps. As long as you had a computer and you opened the Bitcoin program, you would essentially be running a payment network like VISA and MasterCard.
What does this mean? It means you should be able to send Bitcoins to other users yourself. So when I want to buy a smartphone from you, I pay you some Bitcoin. I do this by making a transaction. The transaction is then stored in a block. After waiting maximum ten minutes we know the Bitcoin was transferred. But this brings up some questions — so how much is a Bitcoin? How can a Bitcoin be worth anything? The history of money is long, and, actually quite exciting. Looooong time ago, we humans started out with the barter system: I give you some milk, and you give me some tomatoes.
This evolved century after century, ultimately leading to the system we know today which involves banks, cash, debt, loans and lots of interesting financial products.
Today, if we have 1 Dollar, we feel it has a certain value. The Dollar has a value because I can go down to the local store, and buy something with it. If I have dollars, I can get food, I can get drunk and I can even buy a plane ticket to travel the world. If I could not buy something with it, I would not give it any value. It used to be that you could go down to the bank, present your dollar notes, and get the same value of gold.
The dollar has a value because we tell each other it is worth something. If we start not to believe in it, it will decrease significantly in value. This is important to realize. In a normal day to day environment, we think our currency is stable. But if we look at money with more broad eyes, this is actually not always the cash. This is important to keep in mind when we discuss Bitcoin. The reason is that we believe it has a value. It has a value because you and I believe it has a value.
If I go down to the local restaurant and ask to pay them one Bitcoin for a meal, they would probably say YES — because they have heard one Bitcoin is worth This means Bitcoin has a value. Back then, the belief in Bitcoin was so small that Today this seems absurd. In hindsight, this is easy to say. And this kickstarted that maybe it could be more than monopoly money. The reason Bitcoin has a value today is that we believe it is worth something.
If fewer people want Bitcoin, it will become less expensive. The way Bitcoin is designed is there will never be more than We soon have Because Bitcoin now is worth something, because people want Bitcoin for whatever reason, it can be used as cash. To recap, that means Bitcoin was invented to be a cash system. And because people now think Bitcoin is worth something, it can be used to pay for things. Previously we skipped through blockchain quite fast, but this time: The blockchain is particularly interesting because the technology people are raving about.
Back to the smart people at the start of the post: They just heard other smart people say the blockchain is important, and they repeat it. As we went through, the real innovation of the Bitcoin white paper, was the blockchain. The innovation how we every ten minutes add a block, which contains transactions, to a blockchain. Not only did this Satoshi Nakamoto figure write a white paper, he also made a computer program.
What he did, was he actually took what he described in his white paper, and made a program that did exactly what we wrote. This program was published to Github. Github is a website for programmers where they can upload programming code and programs. Github is used both for companies — but also for open projects where everyone can see the code and follow along. Just like the original white paper was uploaded as a PDF without anyone knowing who did it, the same is the case with the original program.
The original Bitcoin is open-source. This means you can go and see every line of code that runs Bitcoin! You can click here and see the code yourself. When something is open source, it means a couple of things. This has a couple of very interesting consequences. The first consequence is that this means everyone can copy the code, which is called a fork. Tomorrow, you and I, could simply copy the Bitcoin code and call is Bitcoin2, and we would be up and running.
The second consequence is that other people can improve the code. If I want to add something to the program or fix a mistake, I can. This means hundreds, if not thousands of people, help on the program. The original Bitcoin program is designed as a peer-to-peer system. Remember the illegal downloading software Kazaa, or heard about torrents? These are based on a peer-to-peer system. If I have a music file and I want to share it on the Internet, the first person downloads the file from me directly.
Now, when the third person wants to download the file, he will download half from me and a half from the first person. This is how a peer-to-peer system works. Instead of everyone downloading the file from me, the peers in the system — the users — download and upload data to each other. The original Bitcoin programs work in the same way. When you download the program, you automatically become a computer in the big Bitcoin network. You will automatically download the whole blockchain — which is sent to you from all the other computers in the Bitcoin network.
Every time someone makes a transaction, everyone in the system knows about it in seconds. Every time a new block is added to the blockchain, this block is sent to every single computer in the network.
Bitcoin is run by computers and everyone can join in. But then this begs the question: Of course, if you believe in Bitcoin, you might run the program — but there is really not an incentive to run the program. This is where Bitcoin mining comes in. Bitcoin mining is done from a special program designed for specific users.
This means there are two different Bitcoin programs: When I make a transaction, it will be sent to all the programs within seconds. This works the way that every program is connected to a couple of other computers example 8 computers , and not all of them at the same time:. Imagine every one of these dotes as a Bitcoin program. Whenever something happens, updates are sent to all the computers you are connected to, which sends to all those they are connected to, until everyone has all updates.
It is adding blocks. Remember, transactions are sent out to everyone in the network in seconds. In this scenario, your computer is connected to a lot of fake computers. These could send you wrong information. This is why we also need the blocks, and not only to rely on the transactions we know about within seconds.
While you would definitely trust this enough to spend a few bucks, if I sell you a car, I would definitely not trust this. This is where the blocks come in. The Bitcoin miners are taking all the transactions from the last ten minutes, and adding them to a block.
This might sound trivial — but these calculations are ridiculously difficult and take a lot of effort. The calculations of this calculation adjust over time. Then a month after, we have twenty computers running the program. The way Bitcoin is designed is to create a new block every ten minutes. This means if you suddenly added double as many computers running the mining software at once, it would take five minutes between each block until the difficulty of the calculation has been adjusted.
So a short re-cap: When this is solved, we can finish the block and add it to the blockchain. The more computers trying to solve the calculation, the more difficult the calculation becomes. Well, there are two reasons. First of all, ever wondered how the first Bitcoin was made? Ever wondered how new Bitcoins are made? Every time the calculation has been solved, a new block is added to the blockchain. Adding a block to the blockchain gives a reward. This reward is currently The first reason miners are running this program is that of the reward.
This reward halves every 4 year — so back in the reward was 50 Bitcoins for every block added. Wait , so every ten minutes I have a chance to solve the calculation and earn I think I can be lucky! Forget it — right now. No one runs these programs alone. Then you get a percentage of the rewards, instead of the full reward. The second reason the miners are running the program is transaction fees. Remember how every, single, transaction ever made in the Bitcoin system, is stored on blocks?
This means that if you run the Bitcoin network, you have access to every single transaction EVER made. This takes up some disk space! And even though hard disks are pretty cheap, this could become a problem.
Because of this, Bitcoin has enforced a 1mb limit for every block your smartphone probably have 32gb or 64gb of space, so 1mb is very little space! That means when the Bitcoin miner that actually solved the calculation, they cannot accept more than 1mb worth of transactions.
The way the miners determine which transactions to add is by looking at transaction fees. This means, if you add too little a fee, it will not become part of the blockchain. This is why it costs money to send transactions:. This is the latest 3 months development of the Bitcoin Transaction fees. Yes, it costs more than 20 USD to transfer Bitcoins — very expensive to buy a coffee with, right? This is also a good time to confirm: Yes, sending Bitcoins are not free.
It used to be basically free, but today it costs more than 20 USD — for ONE transaction — rendering it completely useless for anything remotely related to commerce for the time being. Recently, there has been some news that it cost more to run the Bitcoin network than the electricity usage in many countries — combined! A common misunderstanding is that Bitcoin uses so much electricity because more and more people use it. This is the logical thinking: Bitcoin must be horribly ineffective since it already now — as a young technology — uses so much electricity!
And if more people use it, how much more computers will it not require running the network? Well, the challenge is actually another. If no one else decided to mine Bitcoin, and I was the only one running a Bitcoin miner, I could run the whole system on my laptop!
I could take my now 4-year-old MacBook, set up the Bitcoin miner, and I would have no problem running the whole system. It would require the same amount of energy as watching a movie on Netflix.
And a related side note to miners: And this is why the Bitcoin system is so electricity intensive. If Bitcoin becomes ten times as valuable, the electricity usage is going to ten-double.
If it works here, Bitcoin would probably add the same method, reducing electricity usage too much, much less. So of all the things to worry about Bitcoin, I am not personally worried about electricity usage. Stepping a bit back, it makes sense to be critical: And why is it that the block guarantee the transaction is actually legit? To understand this, we need to dig a bit a bit more into the Bitcoin program.
The important thing is that when a miner adds a block to the blockchain by solving the calculation, they add their own small signature to the block. The signature is the answer to the very difficult calculation. However, while it is very difficult to solve the calculation, it is very easy to see that the answer is correct.
They validate this by checking the answer is correct to the very difficult calculation. This proof of work is what makes Bitcoin secure.
The moment you see a block has been added to the blockchain, the Bitcoin program will validate that the block is actually legit — and when it is — you trust the block! I now add a new computer, but I have a fake history of transactions, saying I have thousands of Bitcoins. But this leaves two problems for me as a scammer. The first one is everyone else already share the blockchain history, so they would know my history is wrong, second, I have not done the proof of work — so no one would trust me scamming attempt!
Why 21 million Bitcoins? Why a new block every 10 minutes? Why a 1mb limit on every block? These are all decisions made in Bitcoin. These are decisions the original Bitcoin program included.
They could just as well have been 20 Million Bitcoins, a new block every 8 minutes and a limit of 5 Mb. Like any software program, these are just a decision made by the original founder of Bitcoin. This is decided by the Bitcoin mining programs. All the Bitcoin miners run a specific version of the Bitcoin mining software.
This Bitcoin mining software has built in the rules. If you make this new version of the Bitcoin software and make the Bitcoin miners run this software, we have now successfully updated Bitcoin. This is true for everything in Bitcoin. All the underlying features and decisions in Bitcoin is decided by the version the miners run. Bitcoin updates happen quite often.
Since every new feature is reviewed by thousands of developers remember how the source code is hosted on Github and can be seen by anyone? Earlier, we talked about transaction fees. These fees are surprisingly high.
So why not just rise the size of blocks to 2mb? This would decrease the transaction fees right away! But, this could also decrease how many people that can run the Bitcoin program. At the time of writing the Bitcoin blockchain is Gb. This is already such a big size, you do not want this on your smartphone.
Or my old MacBook. By increasing the block size to 2mb, this will double the growth size of the blockchain. If the size of the blockchain becomes very big, very few people can run it. This means Bitcoin becomes less safe because it would be fewer people controlling Bitcoin.
This is the development of the size of the blockchain. Soon, not so nice to run on my old Macbook! This resulted in two different groups: Higher transaction fees reduce the incentive to make lots of transactions, which is fine for a system that is copying cold. Another group meant Bitcoin should be cheap to use — and they wanted to change the block size. They took the original Bitcoin software you can find on Github, changed the limit to 2mb instead of 1mb, and released Bitcoin Cash!
Bitcoin Cash is simply Bitcoin, but with a different block size limit. Bitcoin Cash shares the same Blockchain history as Bitcoin itself. Bitcoins lives on perfectly fine, and Bitcoin Cash lives on perfectly fine.
Bitcoin has a market cap of roughly 10x of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Cash is much cheaper to use but does not share the brand and popularity of Bitcoin.
Another misconception is that we have one blockchain. Bitcoin is running on a blockchain. The blockchain itself is just a list of all the blocks and the transactions in the blocks. When Bitcoin cash made their fork, they blockchain was a different one. If you and I decide to make Bitcoin2 tomorrow, we could either start completely over without any history — just like Bitcoin started in — or we could do like Bitcoin Cash and include all the history.
Because this is so easy, we also have thousands of alternatives to Bitcoin today. An important takeaway is, therefore: I can make one tomorrow, and that has zero value.
And when I transfer them, I take these coins and move them to you. In Bitcoin, you have Bitcoin addresses. Think of a Bitcoin address like an e-mail address. The transactions we add to a block could basically be: Try to see the following two links. Here is a link of a block. An example of a transaction could be this one. In this transaction someone just transferred 1 Bitcoin, roughly Just like when you have an e-mail address, you have a password.
When you have the password to your e-mail address, you have access to send e-mails. The same is the case with the Bitcoin addresses. The Bitcoin address is called a public key, and to send transactions from a Bitcoin address, you need to have the private key. The private key is a long text — just like the Bitcoin address — and the holder of that key has access to spend the Bitcoin on that address.
Bitcoin is anonymous if no one knows who is behind the Bitcoin address. However, this is usually not the case. First of all, today, how do you get your Bitcoins? Since all transactions are stored in the blockchain, and available to everyone, you can also track how those Bitcoins are spent.
This is very important going forward. And that is the closest we are to see the actual transaction. So it Bitcoin anonymous? As much as your e-mail address. But every time you interact with the real world, it becomes less anonymous. This concludes our first phase: These transactions are then grouped into blocks, which is added to a big blockchain every ten minutes. The reason this happens is that Bitcoin miners are running a special Bitcoin program, that calculates difficult calculations.
This is pretty much it, and this makes it possible to continue to the next phase: So why is this so exciting? To understand this, we need to look at decentralization and that it really means. It seems like a simple idea, and it is. This technology alone opens up a lot of opportunities!
A very popular example is payments. But wait a second. I could also argue: Recently, a credit card of mine was stolen — and MasterCard simply just did a chargeback and I got my money back. So what is best? The centralized or decentralized organization? Every day, we use both central and decentral systems.
Google and Facebook are organizations who own everything: They make the rules. Google is very centralized. This has nothing to do with blockchain — everything is made and hosted by Google. This has a lot of benefits. Very profitable businesses can hire more people, and make their product better. They can pay a very good salary, which is a great incentive for the smartest people in the world to work at them.
Businesses usually also rely on having a very good reputation, so they invest huge amounts of money into customer service. I would argue many of the biggest and most important things in the world is made by companies. Corporations are an amazing invention, which is effective in pushing out great products. But centralized companies also have problems. How do you plan to write with your friends without Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram?
You have no backup plan. At the same time, we also use decentralized systems every day. The e-mail protocol is by itself, decentralized. That is because e-mail a decentralized platform.
Gmail is just one of the many programs you can use. Because it is decentralized, it also means you are able to write to people who are NOT using Gmail or Outlook. You can write to anyone. This is very far away from how Messenger inside Facebook works. The difference is that Facebook is fully centralized, while e-mail is decentralized. However, with most things today, the world works with a fully centralized system. Why on earth would I also bother? Facebook, Uber and my bank work pretty damn great.
This question is very important. Because you can argue two ways, and these arguments are very likely to sway your opinion about blockchain and Bitcoin. If you think decentralization seems unimportant, you are not going to buy into the idea behind blockchain. One argument is centralized systems just work better. Centralized systems are usually corporations with a solid business model. They can afford the best people by paying salaries. Facebook is so good because they have thousands of engineers to make your user experience better.
The counter-argument is that decentralized systems are better. You own your own data, and if you disagree with how something works, you can just switch provider.
No one can disallow you to use e-mail or the Internet. And what is best? Up until today, most things are not decentralized, but a few very important technologies are e-mail and the Internet for instance. Blockchain, however, makes it possible to make much more things decentralized.
Up until recently, I have often been a big fan of corporations and centralizations. But, follow me for a second. Today, we have not split a lot of things between a decentralized foundation and a centralized wrapper. When I look through my day, I rely and mostly used companies which is centralized. However, imagine a world where both Facebook, your bank, the Uber fleet, the Airbnb housing platform and everything else we use was decentralized. You would own the data, you would have NO commissions to third parties and you could decide HOW you want to use the platform.
I believe A LOT of systems could benefit from this. But the biggest problem is most decentralized systems are just not possible — at least not before blockchain.
Who should develop a decentralized taxi fleet, without being able to earn money? Why would anyone do that? But this is why Blockchain will potentially change the world.
We could easily argue that a decentral Uber fleet would make a lot more sense, but because no one will get paid to put in the enormous work do create it — no one will. One of the things blockchain make possible, is to pay people for doing work. Just see how much the early Bitcoin adopters have been rewarded — the same logic can be applied to most likely everything.
Blockchain makes it possible to REMOVE the underlying protocol — the data and the underlying rules of the system — from the app you use. And this is very, very big news. This is why many of the smartest people in the world love and work with blockchain. Bitcoin is basically saying: Bitcoin is a protocol; you own the data and Bitcoin defines how the rules are. You can trust the Bitcoin protocol to actually do as you expect.
However, today, we have multiple centralized companies in the Bitcoin space. The most famous is Coinbase. Coinbase is Gmail or Outlook, Bitcoin is the e-mail. This gives a lot of options. An example was when Bitcoin Cash was made as described earlier. Coinbase sent out an e-mail saying: E-mail from Coinbase before the Bitcoin split, which made Bitcoin Cash. Coinbase gave me as a user a choice on what to do.
Imagine if you could do the same with Facebook. And all would be good. When Bitcoin came out, it started as a payment system. However, I would argue something way more important happened. To explain what, I will use an analogy.
Runners tried and tried, but they simply never got under the 4-minute mark. Then, one day, after years and years of trying, Roger Bannister managed to do it! This was impressive, but something even more impressive happened after.
Years after, the record was broken many times. The 4-minute mile was made by a lot of runners. When people saw it was possible, they tried and could make it. I believe Bitcoin to be the Four-minute mile of Bitcoin did something no one was thought to be possible: And when that suddenly is possible, then much more is also possible. LOTS of inventions happened quickly after Bitcoin came out.
Etherium made it possible to run software as decentralized programs, Dash made a decentralized voting system for decisions and lots of smart people are going much further than Bitcoin. I have a strong belief that Bitcoin simply opened a door. Bitcoin opened a new area of research, and the second you open that door, lots of low-hanging fruits are there. These are the fruits we will start to see in the coming years. Before we move on to phase 3; I want to cover 3 very interesting innovations that will mean a very big deal looking ahead: Today computer programs can be run on your smartphone or laptop.
It can also be run on a server, just like when you go to Facebooks website, it runs a computer program which is your news feed. However, the code that runs on your smartphone and mine, are not the same. A huge part of our lives today are dependent on contracts. Everything you own — your home, your car, your stocks and your bank account — is based on a contract. Everything you buy and sell in a company — is based on a contract.
An invoice is a contract, your relationship with Facebook is based on terms of services which is a contract and so much more are basically contracts. Previous to the blockchain, it was not possible to manage contracts in computer programs, unless you trusted a third party.
When we sign an insurance contract, we trust the insurance company to make the right decisions. You go to a hospital on your travel and you pay cash. You now go back to your insurance company and file a report to get your money back. This flow is a bit weird. This actually makes very little sense if you think more about it.
What if instead the insurance contract was made into code. The second you could prove you were sick and uploaded the receipt, a small computer program verified it and you would get your money without problems. In this scenario, you would not trust the insurance company, but the contract you signed.
This would be a much better experience for you — and — why would we even need the insurance company in this case? The insurance company also needs to turn a profit and — have many people employees — making your insurance policy much more expensive than it could be.
This is why Etherium was made. And no, this is not a character from Lord of the Rings despite sounding like it. Etherium describes themselves in the following way:. So, this description is obviously even worse than the title of the Bitcoin white paper.
What is a decentralized platform? What is a smart contract? Etherium is also based on blockchain technology. Just like Bitcoin, it has a blockchain. Just like Bitcoin, it also has blocks 17 seconds instead of 10 minutes , a block limit not 1mb, works in a different way and you can make transactions.
Instead of 21 million Bitcoins, there is no upper limit in Etherium and it grows every year. In Etherium, you have Ether instead of Bitcoins. In Bitcoin, you could send transactions between two addresses. This contract can be made by developers. So imagine a contract would be: This is possible in Etherium! With Etherium you can, therefore, manage contracts.
And this is very, very interesting — because if we start to think a bit more generic about contracts. How much is really not somehow a kind of contracts? In a corporation, you have an ownership. This is the new way to get rich — quick! By reading this, it says that the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies are Not only do they sound like an orc from Lord of the rings, all their team photos are also made up of a geeky group:.
They all look like this. Bitcoin are going to crash. Etherium are going to crash. Not even remotely close. But as of today, there are very little real value. They are few real use cases. There are absolutely nothing but speculation and big ideas that is maintaining a billion USD market cap….