https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc2en3nHxA4
- Bitcoins are the first decentralized digital currency which are transferred person-to-person via the internet
The original white paper published publicly online by Satoshi Nakamoto is titled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System'
Satoshi Nakamoto introduced their white paper noting that commerce online has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic transactions for them. (VISA, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal just to name a few) and while this system was sufficient for most of the transactions it still suffered from the inherit weakness of a trust based model.
This meant that completely irreversible transactions were not really possible because the institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes, the cost of the mediation increases the transaction costs (higher fees) and the possibility of transaction reversal for irreversible products causes the trust between the merchant and financial institutions to spread, merchants are then more wary of their customers hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need.
Satoshi Nakamoto realized that what was needed was an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a financial institution from stepping in. Transactions that were computationally impractical to reverse which would protect merchants from fraud and routine escrow systems could easily be implemented to protect buyers.
The white paper proposes a solution to the double-spending problem (What's to stop the 1 Bitcoin I sent you to someone else as well?) using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to process transactions (provide proof) of the order of the transactions, this system is secure only as long as honest nodes collectively control more power than any cooperating group of attacking nodes. This is referred to as the Blockchain.
You can read the original white paper over at Bitcoin.org or here https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
So.. Where's the bitcoin I just bought and sent to my wallet?
At the moment their are many different versions of Bitcoin available, the original chain has split into different versions over different beliefs on how the system should progress further as more people use the system you can read more about this at the below link
https://www.bitcoin.com/info/bitcoin-cash-is-bitcoin
The Bitcoin (Segwit) that you have bought is currently not prepared for the amount of people using their network which has caused a backlog of transactions meaning that the people who pay a higher fee get their transactions confirmed faster, this is not what Bitcoin was originally about and why I recommend you do some research into the current developments of Bitcoin (Segwit) and why Bitcoin Cash is delivering on the original white paper posted by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Start Here. https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets ... s/dl8v4lp/
If you have any questions feel free to post these below and I'll do my best to answer as much of them as I can
Common Questions
I sent bitcoins to the wrong address, how do I get them back?
There's two answers to this question..
If you sent your bitcoins to an address you don't have the private key of then unfortunately you're generally not going to be able to get your Bitcoins back. This includes a majority of the exchanges you use to buy or sell bitcoins, you would only be able to get your coins back if you contact the exchange or person who holds the private key and they agree to help you out.
If you sent your bitcoins to an address you do have the private key of then you are in luck as you're able to download a bitcoin wallet which is relevant to the coins you own (BCH would be a Bitcoin Cash wallet and BTC would be a Bitcoin Segit wallet) and then use that wallet to import the private key and collect your coins. You can find these programs via Google as I'm not sure whether I can link wallet programs here.
I'll update these as they come through