Bitcoin Course | Big Picture Basics 4.2 – Network Participants

Video Transcript:

[Music] Bitcoin is a network of willing participants what do I mean by this well in this section you’re going to go through lists of all the different people within the network and the physical side the miners and all these different people they have different levels of how much they can engage and so when you transact in Bitcoin you can decide when you want to send Bitcoin how you want to send it to who you want to send it and how much you want to send it completely by your own valtion you even decide what fee you want to pay and so you broadcast to the network payer want to send a transaction and that transaction is picked up by the nodes the nodes store the information of who wants to send Bitcoin who’s already sent Bitcoin and a big long list of transactions and that file that copy of everyone’s transactions is not stored with one node it’s stored with all of them a copy an identical version of the file with every single node so no one individual person can cheat or lie about how much Bitcoin they actually have and so this file is updated every 10 minutes those are the blocks and in these blocks the miners are looking for them and when they find the answer to a block they decide which transactions go in their block remember you decide what fee you want to pay so the miner decides what transactions he wants in his block based on the fees so it’s about your individual contribution versus the collective Network the miners no one forced someone to plug in a machine and help protect this network to earn Bitcoin they decide how much or how little they want to contribute even the nodes themselves that store this big transaction list they can store the entire file or they could store a small amount just the latest transactions it’s a network of willing participants and that’s what’s so amazing about Bitcoin is it’s essentially Freedom a freedom to transact a freedom to ear learn a freedom to participate by storing and verifying everyone’s transactional activity it’s really interesting and I recommend you go through this section learn about all of the different people and participants and see if any of them take your interest you could economically produce Bitcoin with energy verify the network as you believe in the system or conduct your activity in your wallet but remember this you have a private key with your wallet and a public key similar to how we discussed with public information and private information on the internet your private is your password it’s the golden access golden key to getting into your wallet so do not share it with anyone and you use your private key to send Bitcoin and sign messages if you’re doing any form of other sorts of activities with your wallet your public key is the address the the bank account number think of it like that where you can receive bit coin so you you share it out to people that you want them to know and and you can have as many public Keys as you like you’re not limited to One account like with your bank you can open thousands if you like and so it’s complete network of willing participants is freedom but remember it’s about your individual contribution responsibility versus the whole Collective Network and that’s what’s really amazing it has that Duality between us on the [Music] group