Mao Lal | Bitcoin: What is it, where can you use it and is it worth investing?
Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by a mysterious figure using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. It can be used to buy or sell items from people and companies that accept bitcoin as payment, but it differs in several key ways from traditional currencies. Bitcoin has no central bank and isn’t linked to or regulated by any state. The supply of the cryptocurrency is decentralized – it can only be increased by a process known as “mining”. For each bitcoin transaction, a computer owned by a bitcoin “miner” must solve a difficult mathematical problem. The miner then receives a fraction of a bitcoin as a reward. Why is bitcoin’s value soaring? Like all assets or currencies, bitcoin's price is determined by the amount that people are willing to pay for it. Whether that is the “right” valuation, and whether bitcoin is truly worth that amount or not, is largely down to opinion. JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon recently labeled bitcoin a fraud and said its ...