To understand how bitcoin works under the hood, you can think of it like an ultimate google doc, a shared spreadsheet in the cloud which is just a list of transactions. That’s literally all bitcoin is, it’s just a ledger, a list of who sent money to who.
At the most basic and fundamental level, bitcoin is just a ledger.
But instead of existing on the computers of banks, it exists on hundreds of thousands of computers all around the globe.
They all have the same ledger and everyone is in complete agreement with who sent money to who.
If you’re having trouble putting an image of bitcoin in your head just think of a long digital excel spreadsheet, a calculator that keeps track of everyone’s money.
So when people say, bitcoin isn’t real, it’s the same as saying your money in the bank isn’t real.
Except of course the bitcoin ledger is the most powerful and secure supercomputer on earth, can’t be hacked or shut down, and you have full autonomy over your savings.
When we’re talking about digital dollars or Zuckerberg bucks, the money ledger is stored on a central server. Basically the bank has a private computer that they keep all the records of everyone’s money.
The big difference is that Bitcoin’s ledger is a decentralized server. It’s hosted on tens of thousands of computers across the globe. Every bitcoin computer has a full copy of the bitcoin blockchain, for a fully transparent system. Bitcoin’s ledger is everywhere, its in the cloud.
It’s the great excel spreadsheet in the sky.
Bitcoin is like an unstoppable PayPal, beaming digital super-gold around the world at the speed of light. It allows you to send and receive value, to and from anyone in the world, with nothing more than a smartphone and an internet connection.
The software operates on it’s own. All of bitcoins functions are facilitated by computer code. There’s no customer service you can call, no corporation that can change the rules, and no government that can stop your payments.
And anyone can access it, no exceptions.