Our society is increasingly making digital payments. Do you buy a kilo of apples on the market? Then there is a good chance that you also pay for this purchase digitally. This is because you probably pay for your apples with your debit card. It may not seem like it, but that too is a digital payment.
The current money system is actually not built to make digital payments. Do you pay with a regular note of ten? Then there is nothing wrong. The new owner of the note is sure that he just got ten. This becomes more difficult with a digital payment.
In principle, the ten euro then changes to two digits on a screen. They are easy to copy. So you could, for example, make two tens. To prevent you from receiving copied tens, banks supervise all digital transactions. As a result, the influence of banks is growing considerably.
Bitcoin is the first money system developed specifically to facilitate digital payments. The main difference is that bitcoin doesn’t need a regulator like a bank. Bitcoin is a decentralized and open system. Anyone can contribute to the management and development of the currency.
The bitcoin system is maintained by thousands of parties to ensure that bitcoin can function decentralized. They all have a copy of the entire transaction history of bitcoin.
Do you send bitcoin? Then they check on the basis of that transaction history whether you have sufficient balance. This way they prevent a bitcoin from being copied and can be spent twice.