Bitcoin turns 10 – The Washington Post

Bitcoin turned 10 this week. Despite having reached this maturity milestone, it’s still too new an investment for the average investor.

Bitcoin is an electronic currency that exists only on the Internet. It’s not something you can hold in your hand. There are no actual coins. It’s basically lines of computer code stored on a computer or held by a third party in a virtual wallet. The value of this cryptocurrency and others like it such as ethereum and litecoin can rise or fall substantially and quickly.

The creation of this electronic cash 10 years ago is attributed to a white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for its author.

The paper — Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System — led to this new online currency.

The idea was to create virtual money that could be “sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution,” the paper says.

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