There is no Federal Reserve, or the equivalent of a Bank Indonesia, that controls or regulates Bitcoin. There is no central payment company like PayPal or GoPay that owns, promotes, or operates Bitcoin.

Instead, Bitcoin is like digital gold. It can be “mined” just like gold. Once you have Bitcoin you can hoard it away and nobody can take it from you as long as you keep your digital wallet secure.

The idea for Bitcoin was released to the world through a now famous white paper reputedly authored by Satoshi Nakamoto in October 2008. In this paper, Nakamoto defined an electronic currency system that allowed instant payments between two or more parties connected through the internet without the need to trust any third-party intermediary, or indeed, without the need for the transacting parties to know or trust each other. What was trusted was the underlying technology – and that technology was blockchain.

It is worth noting that Bitcoin has never been hacked or compromised. Nobody has ever been able to create Bitcoin out of nothing, nor to alter or reverse Bitcoin transactions. Nobody has ever been able to break the blockchain security that underpins the trust in Bitcoin.

Nakamoto was able to describe a new and clever way to employ cryptography to enable the use of electronic money between peers on the internet.

In essence what Nakamoto described is a transaction ledger that records transactions involving the creation of Bitcoin, and the movement of Bitcoin from one party to another. The innovation is that this ledger is not owned by any one party but exists as a decentralized database distributed amongst all the participants in the Bitcoin network.

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