Bitcoin's current price is $86,771.60 with a 2.56% increase today. Here's a breakdown of its performance ¹:
- *Current Price*: $86,771.60
- *Open Price*: $84,604.11
- *High Price*: $88,465.99
- *Low Price*: $84,451.68
- *Market Cap*: $1.76 trillion
- *Percent Change*: 2.56%
How does Bitcoin work?
While the general public perceives Bitcoin as a physical looking coin, it is actually far from that. Under the hood, it is a distributed accounting ledger that is stored as a chain of blocks - hence the name blockchain.
Let's compare how Bitcoin is different from a commercial bank, which operates as a centralized system. Given a situation where Alice wants to transact with Bob, the bank is the only entity that holds the ledger that describes how much balance Alice and Bob has. As the bank maintains the ledger, they will do the verification as to whether Alice has enough funds to send to Bob. Finally when the transaction successfully takes place, the Bank will deduct Alice’s account and credit Bob’s account with the latest amount.
Bitcoin conversely works in a decentralized manner. Since there is no central figure like a bank to verify the transactions and maintain the ledger, a copy of the ledger is distributed across Bitcoin nodes. A node is a piece of software that anybody can download and run to participate in the network. With that, everybody has a copy of how much balance Alice and Bob has, and there will be no dispute of fund balance.
Now, if Alice were to transact with Bob using bitcoin. Alice will have to broadcast her transaction to the network that she intends to send $1 to Bob in equivalent amount of bitcoin. So how does the system determine if Alice has enough bitcoin to execute the transaction? This is where mining takes place.
