rationalskepticism.org

byofrcs wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

Rob Lister wrote:get bitcoins however (mine, buy, trade, steal)

This is the bit I don't get. How are BitCoins issued? Buying, trading,stealing is simple, but how do I "mine" BitCoins? Who will "promise to pay the bearer on demand"?

The network. Anyone (you , me, the governments) can setup a mining node. Just buy some fast GPU and join a mining operation.

The promise is because the coin is a chain of cryptographic hashes that is authenticated by the network. To abuse this you need to break 256 bit crypto and mess with a network of unknown peers.

As processor speeds grow then the system automatically makes it harder to generate a valid hash.