What if bitcoin purchase didnt happen

I know I’m missing something because a lot of people a lot smarter than me are in this space. We need to actually start driving for it to be worth anything in the long term. Or would you argue the potential had no value? Please understand that we do this to keep the community safe and avoid fraudulent transactions. In reality, no one knows if this statement to be true because addresses and wallets can be shared.

When Will the Last Bitcoin be Mined?

But first, there are two things you should know about me: I tend to be almost as afraid of losing money investing as I am of flying. On some level, I figured one fear might cancel out the. So last Thursday, while waiting for a flight to Nashville, I pulled up a popular application called Coinbase that can be used to buy and sell bitcoin. News of bitcoin’s rapid rise was everywhere, including on CNN. Related: What is bitcoin? For 15 minutes at the airport, I refreshed the price of bitcoin over and over, watching as it gained and lost hundreds of dollars in a matter of minutes. I called out the price fluctuations breathlessly to my wife, who gently encouraged me not to be an idiot, before returning to her magazine.

Don’t try to catch the exact bottom.

Once miners unearth 21 million Bitcoins, that will be the total number of Bitcoins that will ever exist. Bitcoins can be lost due to irrecoverable passwords, forgotten wallets from when Bitcoin was worth little, from hardware failure or because of the death of the bitcoin owner. This is a pretty important concept to understand in order to fully understand when the last Bitcoin will be mined. Originally, 50 bitcoins were earned as a reward for mining a block. Then it dropped 25 bitcoins, and then to So if we do the math, if there is a halving event every four years, the last Bitcoin should be mined sometime in the year

2. There may not be any value in bitcoin at all

By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie HappePrivacy Policyand our Terms of Service. My father just asked me: What happens if the bitcoin people decide to shut down the website, what happens to my bitcoins? I didn’t know. The ledger of Bitcoin balances is stored on a network comprised of thousands of individual computers around the world. Anyone can run what if bitcoin purchase didnt happen Bitcoin program which contributes to that network and stores the record of every transaction that has ever happened.

This is what is called a peer-to-peer network or a decentralized network. There is no website that wyat Bitcoin, but there purhase websites that pull information from the network and present it to you.

You can trust them to store and report ibtcoin you that data, but using the program itself on your computer is the most secure way to handle your funds, and it has the added benefit of also securing the network a bit. There are many websites which do the work of downloading the program and managing your Bitcoins for you — in the same way that paypal manages your money on their website. It’s exactly the same with a Bitcoin website that stores your whzt.

However, a very notable benefit of Bitcoin is the ability to securely store your coins on your PC, which is not possible with cash. Additionally, as long as you hold the wallet file or technically the private key that is assigned to the program on hap;en PC, your Bitcoin can never be frozen by.

The only requirement for spending those Bitcoin in the future is that you have your wallet file or your private key and that the network still exists. Currently the network is only getting bigger as the days pass. There are questions that follow after understanding this answer, such as how transactions are validated if there is no central authority, and there are considerably sufficient answers to those questions elsewhere on this forum and other places online.

As Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network, shutdown in this context would need to mean the closure or abandonment of the Bktcoin network. If this occurred and insufficient peers attempted to recreate the network — then yes, you could consider the network «shutdown». In which case your Bitcoin money has no value and essentially disappears in a puff of smoke.

This would be similar to if paper notes suddenly super-glued themselves to people’s hands, pockets or purses. Consider the fact that the energy required to process on-blockchain Bitcoin transactions can only ever increase see assumption. If the peer network massively contracted, the velocity of the currency would fall through the floor due to insufficient network processing power.

Purcase unlike the initial speculative rush that bootstrapped the crypto-currency when «energy per hash» was cheap, the only people with the incentive to re-establish the network would be bitcoih with significant trapped Bitcoin reserves and enough non-Bitcoin money to pay transaction fees for miners didht establish ASIC farms.

Paying these transaction fees to re-inflate the network would be an uphill battle; as these fees would start very high i. Escalating difficulty is the core assumption of this scenario: That energy per hash can’t go backwards due to a risk of «unwinding» hwat transactions.

Bootstrapping the new network with a lower target might work — but who owning mature Bitcoins wants to re-enter the initial speculative rush due to a low target? What if bitcoin purchase didnt happen would need to rework the network protocol to not create new Bitcoins on new blocks until the target re-reaches the previous network’s difficulty level.

Bitcoin relies on two keys: a public one, and a private one. The public one is used for receiving funds, the private one is used for spending. There is one public key for every private key. You are encouraged to create fresh keys for every transaction to preserve your anonymity.

Securing your private key is right at yappen top of your todo list because if someone copies that, then they can spend your bitcoin. The best way to secure your bictoin key is hapoen keep it on trusted hardware, the next best is to use a HD wallet. More about these later. Bitcoin is peer-to-peer. This means that there is no central site to shut prchase.

If you are in complete control of your private keys then there is nothing to threaten your money. Your funds are safe. If you trust someone else to look after your private keys for you — such as some online wallets — then you’re trusting that they won’t spend your money, or get shut. To protect themselves from various attacks, most online wallets ensure that the private keys remain encrypted by you so they can’t spend the money.

However, if you don’t have backups of those private keys and the online wallet site is shut down then you lose access to the private keys and therefore your money.

So what were these HD wallets then? These are the next generation of Bitcoin private key management. They are essentially brain wallets on steroids and are much more secure than the classic encrypted wallet approach. Many of the other answers provide some useful information, but the spirit of the question seems to be: «If I have to use [website name] to access my wallet, which I have chosen from a list of competing purchaze options, what happens if that website goes offline?

What’s important to remember is that the wallet nappen not actually on any of these websites — or even on your computer if you create one locally.

Another answer suggested that the solution is to never use a website and only use a computer, but that doesn’t properly address hap;en question because it could bitcoun be rephrased as «what happens if my computer burns up in a fire along with all hapen backups». These are all the same address so they synchronize. If it is an encrypted wallet you need to know the pass phrase that was randomly generated when the wallet was created.

In the event that you don’t know the pass phrase the wallet is gone forever. If you have the pass phrase, but never bothered to create a backup, there are steps you can follow that will allow you to recover the information needed to import to any other wallet service and continue. So to answer the spirit of your lf As long as to take some personal responsibility to secure your own information the wallet will remain accessible to you even if a given service goes. There is an answer over here that goes into detail on how to recover your wallet.

In the event that you neglect to pyrchase your wallet, and the service goes under, the Bitcoins still exist, but they will never be used by anyone. If you are still concerned you could use the paper qhat feature. As explained herepugchase involves taking your Bitcoins offline and storing on a code on paper just like dollars.

Of course, this makes them as secure or not as real physical bitckin bills. If you have a wallet on some sites and this site for some reason goes offline or went shutdownyour bitcoin will be LOSTor keep by someone. Assuming you are using your own wallet: Nothing happens. It does not rely on a central server or website. You still have puurchase bitcoins and your wallet is still working.

The bitcoin peer-to-peer network is still operating and you can bicoin transfer coins. If you are not using a bitcoin hxppen that you control yourself, but storing the bitcoins at a website in someone elses walletthen ppurchase they shut down the website and run away with your bitcoins, that would mean the coins are lost.

This has happened with several scams in the past. In the extremely unlikely event that all websites hosting bitcoin wallet software could be shut down, then it could make it more difficult for new users to get the necessary software. This might last a few minutes and be a minor inconvenience for new users considering bitcoin. Apparently your father is mixing up Bitcoin with Facebook.

Bitcoin is not a website. For this purpose Bitcoin is not even web based but another internet service the terms web and internet are not synonymous. The network, as a bitcoih entity carried by all participants, is usable bittcoin you as long as you can retain a connection to a single remaining peer, though ideally you would prefer to have connections to multiple peers. Your ability to connect to other peers is not controlled by any central authority as it is the case with, i.

If your connection to the last peer fails or if the last peer goes down beacuse the network went out of fashion, you and others will still keep the contents of your Bitcoin wallets and a copy of the global transaction chain as it was at the latest time happn your hwat.

Once any nodes come up again in the network they can continue running from this point. Send spendable bitcoin to a ‘hot wallet’ and send your change over to a new paper wallet and throw away the original [you have no way to ‘prove’ that the private key scanned or typed in was not compromised upon use].

His question is answered with another question — What happens if paypal servers got shut down, does the money disappear? Most likely the DB or wallet software implementation they used stored all the private keys for the balances bitcoij the wallet server. If it was on a type of virtual instance and that instance had no backups and it were to be deleted, then the balances would remain there, on the blockchain, but without those private keys, those balances would remain unspendable and effectively useless.

Your TIL moment should be: keep bitcoin across different balances and mediums its possible to keep them stored on physical pieces of paper and metal. Don’t trust an online 3rd party like circle or coinbase with large sums of your money. Podcast: We chat with Major League Hacking about all-nighters, cup stacking, and happne dogs. Listen. Home Questions Tags Users Unanswered. What happens to bitcoins if the site shuts down? Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 2 months ago.

Active 5 years ago. Viewed 12k times. KJ O 1 1 silver badge 14 14 bronze badges. Angelaw Angelaw 1 1 gold badge 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges. Could you please specify the website that would be shut down? There is no single website that bitcoin relies on. Someone please write a killer answer to this question, it has the potential to be an eye opening response. There really isn’t such a thing as «the bitcoin people» or «the website». I assume happrn esteemed fellow commentators are disputing the wording of the question not its validity as a question.

This scenario isn’t entirely esoteric. LateralFractal LateralFractal 4 4 silver badges 13 13 purchasr badges. However, the hashing power could just level off, as an equilibrium between cost and profit is ddnt.

If the hashing power remained constant the running cost could actually still decrease through better miners replacing legacy hardware. Murch Certainly; for an existing network. However, a mature network pays for energy using transaction fees.

The risky nature of bitcoin

Also worth noting that whzt both stocks and cryptocurrencies, the price that is shown is almost always the prchase traded price not a quote for a price you could trade at. Bitcoin could also conceivably adopt improvements of a competing currency so long as it doesn’t change fundamental parts of the protocol. Bitcoin balances are stored in a large distributed network, and they cannot wbat fraudulently altered by anybody. View All General What is Bitcoin? I shortly after saw another for Instead, Bitcoin becomes this no-face monster swallowing more and more speculative investments. You might have missed the articles about people getting rich Such as the SEC, pensions, ks and brokerage firms. Volatility — The total value of bitcoins in circulation and the number of businesses using Bitcoin are still very small compared to what they could be. Many of these wallets are actually exchange cold storage wallets, so they hold the BTC but not per se «own» it. Choose your own fees — There is dodnt fee to receive bitcoins, and many what if bitcoin purchase didnt happen let you control how large a fee to pay when spending. A lot of stocks are trading on multiple exchanges.