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45 lines
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45 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
[[ch00_intro_what_is_bitcoin]]
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== Introduction
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=== What is Bitcoin?
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Bitcoin is digital money, a currency for and of the Internet. It is not owned or controlled by any company, group or country. It exists as a set of standards and reference software and as a running network with several thousand nodes worldwide. Behind the scenes, bitcoin is a network, a protocol, a standard and a currency. For now think of it simply as digital money that can be sent, received and stored by anyone, worldwide simply by downloading compatible software and joining a network.
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Under the hood, bitcoin is the culmination of decades of research in cryptography and distributed systems and represents four key innovations brought together in a unique and powerful combination. Bitcoin consists of a de-centralized peer-to-peer network, a public transaction ledger, a de-centralized mathematical and deterministic currency issuance, a de-centralized transaction verification system and a set of powerful APIs. All of these are "bitcoin", and each of these aspects of bitcoin will be examined in this book.
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More than all of these parts, bitcoin is a digital economy platform, just like the Internet is a digital communications platform. With bitcoin, it is possible to build entire new financial systems, transaction types and economies on top of a purely digital, instantaneous and frictionless platform, an Internet for money.
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==== A currency
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==== A network and protocol
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==== A distributed ledger
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==== Proof of work and distributed issuance (mining)
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==== A transaction language
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==== An API
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=== Getting Bitcoin
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==== Obtaining the bitcoin software
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==== bitcoin-qt, bitcoind
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==== mobile client
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=== History of bitcoin
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==== A brief history of money
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==== A brief history of crypto currencies
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==== Public key cryptography and crypto-currency
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==== Peer-to-Peer networks
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=== The history of bitcoin
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==== Why would I use bitcoin
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===== As a merchant
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===== As a consumer
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===== As a developer, integrator
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===== As an entrepreneur
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===== As an investor |