Every day more is getting interested in investing in Bitcoin, after hearing some amazing stories of guys investing in Bitcoin and becoming rich, some people got very interested and new investors are trying to make their way into the world of digital currency, but as you can´t hold this coin in your hand or hide it under your bed there are doubts if it is secure to have Bitcoin and protect yourself against someone trying to hack Bitcoin and taking your bitcoins, maybe you could ask, is Bitcoin secure? According to OCryptoCanada, you can hack bitcoin exchanges but it’s different when we talk about Bitcoin itself. Am I safe against people breaking into the system and getting my Bitcoins?
How Does Bitcoin Work
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency launched in 2009, this means that it doesn´t work under any administration, government, or bank. The transactions work under a system called blockchain, blockchain is a public ledger used to verify and record transactions. These records of information are saved in the blocks from blockchain, these blocks communicate themselves with their own “fingerprint” and the fingerprint of the block before. This information goes to different computers around the world called nodes to compare the existing information and to approve the transaction, once the transaction is approved by the nodes a new block is created but after creating it blockchain compares the information from all the blocks created before to make sure all blocks stay the same as before making the transaction, if the system says everything is okay the transaction is made and the new information of all the blockchain is sent to the nodes, these transactions are anonymous. Now that we know how bitcoin works can blockchain be hacked?
The Problem Of Hacking Blockchain
Let’s say we are hackers and we want to steal bitcoins from blockchain, so we get in blockchain and we hack a block, once we are there, we change the receiver’s address to our wallet´s address and that’s it, we have hacked the block, but there is a problem when we modified the block, the “fingerprint” of the block changed and the block after the block we hacked has information of a different fingerprint, as a consequence, all the rest of the blocks are invalidated and the transaction is canceled. Well, but then we get a new computer with so much power, so now we can modify not just the block I wanted to hack, we can modify all the next blocks making it the perfect operation, when blockchain checks if all the blocks have the correct information it approves that the information between the blocks is correct, so we did it! or that’s what we thought, as I said at the beginning blockchain is a decentralized system, and there are lots of copies of the original blockchain called nodes, to approve the transaction the nodes need to verify if the information they have is the same as the information they are receiving from the new transaction, and when they find out there is a problem the transaction is denied. We are almost finished, now we just need to change the information from the nodes, thus we need a lot of money and people to hack 50% of the nodes plus 1% to validate the transaction knowing there are thousands of nodes around the world.
So, can we hack blockchain? Yes, but we need a lot of people and money to hack more than half of the total nodes to steal bitcoins, although, in theory, it is possible, it is absolutely hard though, this is why it is considered practically hacker-proof.
Does This Mean That My Bitcoins Are Secure?
Not exactly, the transactions are safe due to the blockchain system, so don’t worry about your transactions being hacked or losing your Bitcoin by a hacker, but the blockchain is not the only place with bitcoin. Once you get your bitcoin you will need to save them in a wallet, there are a lot of different wallets for your Bitcoin, these wallets are just for you and only you have the private key for accessing your Bitcoin, but hackers could get your key and take your Bitcoins, hacking the wallet without the key is hard, so it won’t happen at least they hack your computer and get the key, this is why if you are storing bitcoin is recommendable that you get some security against hackers so you can keep your key secure and your Bitcoin stay safe.
