The term bitcoin will certainly be familiar to you, but have you wondered how they are obtained and if it is true that they can make you a kind of Scrooge?
Bitcoin is familiar to you, in some ways, because it is a term that often recurs along with ransonware that asks for ransom precisely with this virtual currency less traceable than normal dollars or euros. Perhaps not everyone knows, however, how to generate bitcoin and why on the web we read stories of those who have become rich with the so-called "mining". Let's shed some light on the matter.
Bitcoins are first and foremost a cryptocurrency, i.e. an online currency but which, unlike traditional currencies, does not have a central bank that controls them or even an organization that oversees transactions. The bitcoin value is highly variable, but many consider it the currency of the future. It's all about two concepts: peer-to-peer and cryptography. The former takes advantage of the P2P network to distribute a database - which contains all transactions that have taken place on the bitcoin network - across various computers around the world, while a public key cryptography system prevents users from spending the same coins more than once. Under the name of mining bitcoin end all the activities necessary to create the virtual currency. But how does mining work and is it a really profitable activity?
What does it mean to do mining bitcoin
Generating bitcoin might appear as a rather simple activity: in fact, all we need is a computer and a client that puts us inside the "network" for the creation of the online currency. The client takes care of downloading data packets from the network containing cryptographic calculations of enormous complexity: once solved, the user will be "rewarded" with a bitcoin or a fraction of the virtual currency. These calculations, as it is easy to imagine, require particularly high performance computers: a very powerful processor and graphics card will be required to be able to solve the cryptographic "puzzles" and earn bitcoin. That's why the most aggressive miners use servers and botnets to solve the puzzles and generate bitcoin faster. In this way you are able to accumulate a greater amount of virtual currency, but also increase the costs: the creation of machines for "bitcoin mining" can easily exceed 2,000 euros and their management costs higher than those of a home PC.
How to earn with bitcoins
If you exclude the use of home computers and the creation of server farms in the garage, you have to rely on collaboration and the Net. In recent years, in fact, were born of the structures - called "mining pool" - where all participants make available their computing resources, then dividing the gains based on their contribution. But also here it is worth the same speech of before: your contribution, with a home computer, is equivalent to a drop in the ocean. But if you have economic resources to equip you of a net with great power of calculation, an attempt could be worth of it.