Class 8, The Bitcoin Blockchain

Many people have heard of Bitcoin, a popular virtual currency used in multiple countries, but not many know how it works or its methods of security such as the bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin can be used as money, energy, shares of stock, pretty much anything that can be bought and traded on the internet can be done using bitcoin. Although these security measures have not convinced a lot of people that bitcoin is safe, mostly because of Mt. Gox, a massive bitcoin failure that took place last year leaving an estimated 450 million dollars of people's money lost or unaccounted for. More info on Mt. Gox can be seen below.

The Bitcoin Blockchain is what is supposed to prevent things like this from happening. It is basically a public record of all transactions, where they came from, where they went to and when all of it took place. If there is any discrepancy, it will (theoretically) be easy to spot because a public record of transactions will show what happened. https://blockchain.info is a website that anyone can access and see real bitcoin transactions being made in real time, as soon as they happen. A screenshot of the website can be seen below.

Bitcoin, and specifically the blockchain are a bit confusing to understand, so I had to look through a few videos before I found one that broke it down into understandable layman's terms. This video that I found was published recently, around 1 year after the events that occurred at Mt. Gox, so hopefully what we are learning in the following video has had some previous bugs worked out of it, and is a more stable security measure for virtual currency.