Bitcoin er en digital valuta opprettet i 2009 av Satoshi Nakamoto. Navnet på valutaen refererer også til open source programmet Bitcoin som brukes for å sende penger. Maks grensen på antall bitcoin som noensinne vil være i omløp er satt på 21 millioner. Det er altså en valuta som vil være uten inflasjon etter at alle bitcoins er delt ut. Bitcoin er basert på P2P teknologi, altså opererer bitcoin uten noen form for sentral server eller mellomenn. "Trust" problemet, altså at man må stole på den som oppbevarer pengene er fjernet i bitcoin. Alle betalinger verifiseres automatisk gjennom noder i P2P nettverket og systemet er bygget opp slik at man ikke kan hverken opprette flere penger eller stjele andres. Dette sikres gjennom en "blockchain" som lagres av alle nodene i nettverket. Dette sikrer en stabil og pålitelig valuta som ikke kan manipuleres hverken av myndigheter, finansielle institusjoner eller brukere, på tross av mangel på sentral styring.
For å quote grunnleggeren:
It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust.
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what.
It’s time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.
One of the fundamental building blocks for such a system is digital signatures. A digital coin contains the public key of its owner. To transfer it, the owner signs the coin together with the public key of the next owner. Anyone can check the signatures to verify the chain of ownership. It works well to secure ownership, but leaves one big problem unsolved: double-spending. Any owner could try to re-spend an already spent coin by signing it again to another owner. The usual solution is for a trusted company with a central database to check for double-spending, but that just gets back to the trust model. In its central position, the company can override the users, and the fees needed to support the company make micropayments impractical.
Bitcoin’s solution is to use a peer-to-peer network to check for double-spending. In a nutshell, the network works like a distributed timestamp server, stamping the first transaction to spend a coin. It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle. For details on how it works, see the design paper here at http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
The result is a distributed system with no single point of failure. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double-spending.
Jeg vet ikke med dere, men jeg har i hvertfall lenge drømt om noe som dette.
I skrivende stund er forøvrig 1 btc (bitcoin) verdt $0.74 USD
http://www.bitcoin.org/