Understanding bitcoin is a task made difficult by mansplainers. Let’s ditch the mansplaining and just normal ‘splain it. 

Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency, which means money through the medium of a computer. The “crypto” part of that chunky word stands for cryptology, or study of codes.  

Bitcoin is basically money made/stored/transferred in geeky computer codes, which is horrifying but cool at the same time. 

Cryptocurrencies are radically different from our current monetary system, by way of getting rid of the third party. For instance, with American dollars, all is regulated by a banking system. But with crypto, money is transferred from peer to peer. 

The heart of Bitcoin is the blockchain. The blockchain is essentially an immutable, public record of any and all transactions made using crypto. If someone wanted to transfer money to someone else, that transaction would be found in the blockchain. 

What’s cool about the blockchain is that people are coding it from all over the world, making it impossible to be held by one organization. 

Another fundamental aspect of bitcoin are miners. Miners, as they’re called, are people (sometimes organizations) who use computer power to code for new blocks on the blockchain. The computer power takes advanced technology, which costs money, so miners are rewarded with newly mined bitcoins. 

Explaining how bitcoin has value would require an understanding that is above my paygrade (which currently resides at $0, as I am unemployed), but hopefully this has helped to aid in the basic understanding of bitcoin. 

This way, you can tell Mr. Mister that actually, he’s wrong when he tries to explain to you what you already know.