Читать книгу Bitcoin For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 36

The first thing to understand is that there is no Bitcoin! Bitcoin as a “physical thing” doesn’t exist, of course. There is no tangible object, no “thing”; no coins, no bills or notes. But more than that, if you were to dig into the programming source code that makes Bitcoin work, you wouldn’t even see a “digital representation” of Bitcoins. That’s because Bitcoin is, plain and simple, information about transactions.

That’s okay, though. There is no physical or digital representation of most of your everyday money, either, whether you use dollars, pounds, euros, yen, or whatever. As historian Yuval Harari has said, “90 percent of all money is nothing more than entries in a computer server.” You can confirm this for yourself; do an Internet search for information about different money supply numbers — M0, M1, M2, and so on — and you’ll find that only around 10 percent of a major currency’s value is represented by actual, physical money (M0) by bills and coins. Instead, the great majority of money is nothing more than entries in a computer server — entries in what we may term a ledger.