World News for Students of English

27-05-2021 07:00

Bitcoin is a digital currency without a central bank. Bitcoin can be sent from user to user via the Internet. Transactions are verified by miners who get bitcoin for their work. Transactions are when people send money or get money.

There will be only 21 million bitcoins, and there will never be more. The price of bitcoin usually goes up, but, of course, it can also go down. These ups and downs can be very big and can happen very fast.

When bitcoin was created in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, everybody could mine bitcoin. All you needed was a computer and special software.

If you want to mine bitcoin today, you need more than one computer. You need many computers. That’s why people create networks of computers to mine bitcoin. Such networks are called mining farms. These farms need a lot of electricity and a good cooling system.

One such farm was built is Russia where low temperatures help to cool the system. This big farm can mine six bitcoins a day.

Difficult words: currency (money), verify (to check that something is true), miner (a person who works to get gold, silver, or bitcoin), mine (to work to get gold, silver, or bitcoin).

You can watch the original video in the Level 3 section.