It is an electronic currency in simple terms.

All bitcoins actually 'live' on the public ledger, meaning that when you 'own' a bitcoin, you basically just own the private key which is used to prove you are the only owner of the coin, and allows you to make transactions with it.

A bitcoin address looks like this -

14DCKSmAooFnFnS5y6Ab9ZLE7p56SYqdUu

That is the public address which you can use to send coins to. The address holds a balance, and you can see the balance and previous transactions of a bitcoin address by looking on blockchain.info -

[link to blockchain.info]

each Public key is paired with a PRIVATE KEY, which is used to unlock your coins and verify you own them if you want to send the coins to a different address. The private key should always be kept encrypted or safe somewhere because that is all you need to access and spend the coins.


Bitcoins can be used to purchase a lot of things. There are tons of retailers starting to accept bitcoin, and that number is growing every day. Lots of online websites are realizing that bitcoin is a great way to collect payment due to not having the possibility of chargebacks, and you can cash out your coins for the current exchange rate quite easily.

What I do to spend coins, however, is use sites like gyft.com and egifter.com to turn bitcoins into gift cards. You can get giftcards for basically anywhere, like walmart, bestbuy, CVS etc. Hundreds of stores.

Let me know if you have any more questions.. I tried to explain as best as I could.


Peace