In December 2012, Tom, a husband and father with a heavy load of student-loan debt, applied for a $30,000 interest-free loan from a credit card company. Over the next month, he used the entire sum to buy up a hoard of the nearly five-year-old virtual currency known as Bitcoin.The $30,000 amounted to the combined value of Tom's retirement and savings accounts. If Bitcoin failed,Whatever matches my outfit for the day, I just kind of slip MAM2201 research chemical
. he would have to declare bankruptcy or wipe out his nest egg. But after reading news articles, Tom had become fascinated with Bitcoin's potential. Something clicked. He bought as many as he could, as fast as he could."This is not a leap of faith. I have done my research. I feel the projects surrounding Bitcoin right now are revolutionary," Tom (not his real name) wrote in an anonymous post on Reddit. "Perhaps I will go to my grave in debt. Perhaps not. That is part of the fun of this little experiment."Bitcoin,which have already been implemented in Titanium Plate
first proposed by an unknown computer programmer in a theoretical 2008 paper as "electronic cash" that could function without banks, has crashed into the mainstream. Investors from both coasts have poured money into PayPal-like businesses that plan to smooth Bitcoin purchases, and its designers have caught the attention of the Justice Department, Treasury Department and Central Intelligence Agency.Its future likely lies somewhere between the ideals of its promoters and the ridicule of its detractors, tied to evolving government regulation, angry debates in its far-flung network of architects and the interference of hackers exploiting still unknown weaknesses. For investors as well as speculators like Tom, the currency carries very real risks and rewards, but its mechanics and uses remain incompletely understood, even by some of its adopters.Bitcoin employs complex mathematics, but it might be most easily understood as an innovative way to prove that money has changed hands. Those who use it do so not because its value is based on a scarce metal, like gold, or upheld by an army to enforce its use, but because of its programming. It approaches the libertarian-hued ideal of a "trustless transaction" — a particularly desirable notion in a digital age — that allows two people who don’t know each other to exchange money and goods with no bank and minimal need for third-party guarantees.Bitcoins exist almost entirely in the electronic world. They are generated by a decentralized network of more than 20,000 computers owned by Bitcoin users — all employing enormous number-crunching power to finish math calculations that yield bitcoins when solved.a member of the organizing outdoor stone floor tiles
. This process is known as mining, and those who own the computer systems are called miners. Bitcoins are exchanged between anonymous addresses that users can create, if they wish, every time they want to make a transaction. Buyers and sellers using cash and bank transfers to barter bitcoins congregate on large online exchanges, where the value of single bitcoins has been known to fluctuate by hundreds of dollars within a single day of trading.