Background
In light of the recent hype around Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency, one could easily get lost by millions of flashy headlines and flooding new jargons. With the investor mania and the heated market sentiment, one could make wrong decisions because of the FOMO (fear or missing out), which essentially in my view is a sheep herd behavior influenced by the mass.
But it’s time to have a cool head especially in this era of information explosion and chaos (e.g. COVID, BREXIT, Trump…).
And it’s time to get to the bottom of the Bitcoin.
It will be a long yet interesting story, but I will try my best to keep it short and fun. To keep it readable, I will write it in a series of short articles.
Viewers please feel free to search on the internet and cross-check other sources (e.g. Wikipedia). Let me know if I make any mistakes (we are all humans) and have wrong understanding.
Below is simply my personal takeaways that may help you to understand Bitcoin better or in an easier way.
My articles contains no advice, and have no intention to sell you or persuade you to do anything. Take it as is for your personal reference only. You are sensible human beings so you are responsible for your own decisions and actions.
Here we go.
First two things
Firstly, Bitcoin is not a physical coin. It has no metal form, i.e. unlike a gold/silver/copper/nickel coin. All the pretty images (of Bitcoins being metal coins, an example below) out there on the internet are simply computer generated arts or artistic expressions done by artists. Some fans or community fellows are really into about bitcoins so there are actually physical realization of these artistic expressions, i.e. toy or souvenir coins manufactured by coin or toy-makers. Don’t get fooled!
Secondly, if you want to get to the bottom of it, Bitcoins are essentially just “bits” or the machine-level “binary data” — just a series of “0”s and “1”s that represent electrical or magnetic signals and stored on the data storages.
In the binary computer world, billions of tiny semi-conductors are used as data storage to store and represent data. Usually “0” means the electrical signal “off” and “1” means on. Simply put, the various combinations of “0”s and “1”s or “bits” represent the machine-level “binary data” that could be ultimately interpreted by chips and translated into the high-level human understandable data or information like “bitcoins” in the bitcoin programs.
Examples of data storages include the chip boards’ memory cards (see below an illustration) or a hard disk or a portable data storage.
If I use a vinyl music record as an example of data storage, the bitcoin’s physical form are actually the “grooves” on the vinyl records which are visible by eyeballs or by microscope (see below an illustration).The grooves’ shapes represent the music data just like the bitcoins are represented on the machine level as the binary data of 0s and 1s, i.e. semi-conductors’ electrical signals. You can’t really see it unless you tear up your data storage using a super microscope (then you destroy your machine as well as your bitcoins).
If the data storage (with bitcoins stored) is powered off or damaged, your bitcoins (binary data) will become no longer accessible or damaged.
If your bitcoins (binary data) are not interpreted using the relevant bitcoin codes or programs (i.e. imagine them as the music record players), your bitcoins are also not accessible or worthless. Theoretically, the same string of binary data could mean different things when running different programs and could be altered when running different applications.
So I guess until now you have a new perspective on bitcoins, and let’s continue the next time.
Hope you enjoy the article, and don’t forget to give me some hand-claps if you like!
