My laptop hard disk started showing errors a few days back, stopped working yesterday and had massive data corruption, that I lost a lot of data(though I had critical data backed up).

Eventually I was looking for a replacement, and figured of purchasing a SSD, which is faster. The Samsung evo had the new 3D NAND technology enabled in the 850 series. This technology has the unique property of rapid access compared to its flat (horizontal) access counterpart and has a longer endurance. Rakuten.com(US subsidiary of Japanese company) was offering the same for a discount if a Bitcoin was used. So, I went ahead an bought it using Bitcoins(converting USD to BTC).

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which is virtual and can be used for buying things without the regulation of a central bank or authority. It is the torrent version of peep to peer money, 3 months ago a popular Bitcoin wallet company coinbase has started a coin exchange with a 75 million USD backed by giants such as the Citi group(NYSE: C).

The entire concept of the currency, including mining is quite interesting. It all started with a paper published by Wei Dai that provided insights into of “b-money”, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system. Soon after that paper was published, Nicholas Szabo, a legal scholar and cryptographer, created bit-gold a precursor to Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrency use. And everything else is history. The concept of cyrptocurrecy  mining is performed with expensive hardware such as GPU or ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit made for Bitcoin mining). The value of 1BTC = 252.57 USD when this article was posted.

[Image source for featured title image:  Coindesk.com, Video sources correspond to respective youtube authors]