Bitcoin, a digital currency that allows you to carry out transactions over the internet, is now accepted by over 120 companies worldwide. Its decentralized nature and mode of operation have made it safe and the most preferred method of online payment.
However, despite the widespread popularity of Bitcoin over the past decade, people still struggle to understand how it works.
This article will briefly explain two important benefits of Bitcoin and why it has gained widespread acceptance amongst business owners.
Ease of Payment
Bitcoin is not controlled by any government or a third party. Online transactions using the cryptocurrency are both secure and fast.
Once you initiate a transaction, it has to be authorized by the “miners.” Miners’ job is to perform a security check to validate how genuine your transaction is. They achieve this by comparing your current transaction to other past transactions in the blockchain.
It takes only a few seconds to validate, and if confirmed, your transaction is marked as complete. This helps in eliminating all forms of bank validation or third-party validation that may delay transactions for days or even weeks.
Very Low Transaction Fees
Bitcoin users usually pay small transaction fees. They have the freedom to choose how much a transaction is supposed to cost them, bearing in mind that the higher the fee attached to their transaction, the faster it gets validated.
Now, you may ask, “How do these miners get paid?”
Miners who authorize Bitcoin transactions get their reward in the form of new bitcoins that are released every time a block of the transaction gets verified successfully. The Bitcoin mining process entails the addition of transaction records to Bitcoin’s public ledger of past transactions, otherwise known as blockchain (a chain of blocks). This blockchain aims at notifying the rest of the network of transactions that have taken place, hence, preventing attempts to respend bitcoins that have been spent earlier. The first miner to solve a complex computational math problem involved in validating a block of transactions gets a reward of 12.5 bitcoins.
Although Bitcoin is gaining widespread popularity as an effective means of online payment, we still need to raise awareness regarding its usage. People who do not understand how it works far outweigh those who do. That is the reason why we created a list of companies that accept Bitcoin as a payment method.
Check out the following infographic for more information.
