Where you can use your Bitcoins

This year has been something of a watershed, with a number of merchants – some of them retail giants with billions of dollars in revenue – deciding to accept bitcoin in exchange for goods and services. Many of them are online e-commerce sites, but an increasing number of bricks-and-mortar stores are also now accepting cryptocurrency.
While in the past trying to find a bitcoin-accepting merchant for the item you want was often tricky or even impossible, there are now growing options for people who don’t wish to pick their way through hundreds of listings just to find products vaguely approximating those they want.
The best way to find bitcoin-accepting merchants is via marketplaces and aggregator sites that gather large numbers of supporting establishments together at once. CoinMap.org also offers a visual way to locate bitcoin stores in any geographical area, and new businesses are appearing all the time. However, CoinDesk has summed up some of the more notable examples of both online and real-world stores in the guide below.

Spending your bitcoin

In previous guides, we’ve told you how to mine bitcoin, and how to buy it. However you acquired your digital currency, if it’s not purely an investment, you’re going to want to spend it at some point. So, what can you buy with bitcoin?

How Can You Buy Bitcoins

Now you’ve realized bitcoin is the money of the future, the next step is to get some bitcoins. But how? This guide will tell you what you need to know.
You can buy bitcoins from either exchanges, or directly from other people selling them. You can pay for them in a variety of ways, ranging from hard cash to credit/debit cards to wire transfers, or even with other cryptocurrencies, depending on who you are buying them from and where you live.
Surprisingly, it’s still not easy to buy bitcoins with your credit card or PayPal. This is because such transactions can easily be reversed with a phone call to the card company (ie: ‘chargebacks’, one of the problems bitcoin is here to solve). Since it’s hard to prove any goods changed hands in a transfer of bitcoins, exchanges avoid this payment method and so do most private sellers.
However, the options have recently grown for US consumers, with Coinbase, Circle (currently invitation only), Trucoin and coin.mx all now offering purchase with cards. Bittylicious also offers this service in the UK, accepting 3D Secure-enabled cards on the Visa and MasterCard networks. For small amounts of bitcoin, you can use a card to buy $20-worth at Tinkercoin.
Underbanked consumers in the US can turn to expresscoin, which recently launched to serve this market, accepting money orders, personal checks and wire transfers.

What is Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. No one controls it. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by lots of people running computers all around the world, using software that solves mathematical problems. It’s the first example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency.

What makes it different from normal currencies?

Bitcoin can be used to buy things electronically. In that sense, it’s like conventional dollars, euros, or yen, which are also traded digitally.
However, bitcoin’s most important characteristic, and the thing that makes it different to conventional money, is that it is decentralized. No single institution controls the bitcoin network. This puts some people at ease, because it means that a large bank can’t control their money.

Who created it?

A software developer called Satoshi Nakamoto proposed bitcoin, which was an electronic payment system based on mathematical proof. The idea was to produce a currency independent of any central authority, transferable electronically, more or less instantly, with very low transaction fees.

Who prints it?

No one. This currency isn’t physically printed in the shadows by a central bank, unaccountable to the population, and making its own rules. Those banks can simply produce more money to cover the national debt, thus devaluing their currency.
Instead, bitcoin is created digitally, by a community of people that anyone can join. Bitcoins are ‘mined’, using computing power in a distributed network. This network also processes transactions made with the virtual currency, effectively making bitcoin its own payment network.

So you can’t churn out unlimited bitcoins?

That’s right. The Bitcoin protocol – the rules that make bitcoin work – say that only 21 million bitcoins can ever be created by miners. However, these coins can be divided into smaller parts (the smallest divisible amount is one hundred millionth of a bitcoin and is called a ‘Satoshi’, after the founder of bitcoin).

What is it based on?

Conventional currency has been based on gold or silver. Theoretically, you knew that if you handed over a dollar at the bank, you could get some gold back (although this didn’t actually work in practice). But bitcoin isn’t based on gold; it’s based on mathematics.
Around the world, people are using software programs that follow a mathematical formula to produce bitcoins. The mathematical formula is freely available, so that anyone can check it. The software is also open source, meaning that anyone can look at it to make sure that it does what it is supposed to.

Top Security Rules if you operate with Bitcoins

It keeps amaze me how many risks we take nowadays in terms of use in the internet. What i know also is that few simple steps can improve significant the security of your online venture.

I heard of different ways of how someone can track your transactions or try to force your wallet security. The Cyber attacks, are not something new and i won't explain you about different attacks in this post but i will keep in mind in my future ideas. This post is about how you can improve your wallet security with simple techniques.

Let me tell you, what i have found about the latest improvements in security related to bitcoin wallets.