Help me understand bitcoin

[jlauro]

trunkswd said:

jlauro said:

Actually that is not exactly right, but is close...  and what makes these digital currencies different then minting your own physical currency.  Anyone can make more of the same digital currency, it just takes some amount of effort (ie: compute, or storage, etc).  So, if you can do the tasks you can basically make your own bitcoin or whatever money.  The interesting part is that each new coin takes more effort to produce than the previous coin.  So those first growing their own money can mine / make a lot of coins relatively cheaply, and the longer more and more people have been making "free" coins, the more work it costs to make more coins.

So we can make a VGChartz coin? I'd buy some. 

Sure that would be possible.  You would want enough earlier miners to create a decent base, otherwise once it's open someone with more advanced hardware (or at least scale) would be able to out mine and flood the initial currency and basically devalue you initial coins rather quickly.