Today, there are thousands of different cryptocurrencies out in the crypto market.

And when prices have surged in the past, the total value of all these cryptocurrencies has exceeded $2.9 trillion, with daily trading volume of over $130 billion. 

In other words, the crypto market has grown rapidly and it’s now pretty big. (But still nowhere as huge as the forex market.)

Since Bitcoin was the original cryptocurrency, the technical breakthroughs that allowed Bitcoin to emerge underlie all other cryptocurrencies.

Many of the concepts needed to understand Bitcoin can be applied to other cryptocurrencies.

I will start with a gentle introduction to Bitcoin and assume you have little to no technical knowledge.

Let’s start with a very simple description of Bitcoin….

All transactions, after being confirmed by miners using PoW as the consensus mechanism, are stored on a distributed ledger, called a blockchain.

Changes to the blockchain are append-only and are synchronized about every10 minutes across thousands of nodes located all over the world over a P2P network. All information stored on the blockchain can be viewed publicly, in real-time.

Cryptographic techniques such as public-key cryptography, hash functions, and digital signatures are used to keep the blockchain secure and immutable so it can be accessible to everybody but hackable to nobody.

This is the BEGINNER’S guide to Bitcoin and we assume zero technical knowledge.

Jumping into crypto introduces a large number of terms that most people will be unfamiliar with.

The crypto world seems to have its own language and those wishing to learn about the topic can quickly become overwhelmed with all the jargon, acronyms, and other technical terms.

But if you really want to understand cryptocurrencies and how they are different, it’s really important that you do familiarize yourself with certain core foundational concepts.

My goal is to cover terms and phrases that you may initially not know, but do need to know.

I’ve also found a lot of inconsistencies in how certain terms are used or defined on the interwebz.

I want to establish a common vocabulary with clear definitions of concepts and terms.

I can’t stress enough the importance of learning the concepts behind all this ridiculous wonderful jargon.