Last couple of decades have witnessed a paradigm shift in human lifestyle. The perspective of doing business has changed to an extent where the customer has bought a product or has received a service from a seller without having met each other in person or spoken to each other over phone. Email has become the primary mode of business communication, physical signature has almost become obsolete. The digital world has taken over the physical exchanges of papers. Currency exchanges has also followed the same trend. E-Transactions and transfer of money has also become digital. A buyer sends money to the seller digitally using internet and the seller’s bank account gets credited in almost no time. A buyer in US can send money to the seller in China using Internet Banking and the transaction gets completed in few minutes.

Each and every country in this world has their own currency which can be exchanged and transacted. In 2009 a new currency surfaced out which is popularly known as Bitcoin. It is an online payment system introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto. The Bitcoin payment system is an open source software which was released in the year 2009. Since then it has gained a lot of popularity among users from all over the world.

What is Bitcoin? A popular definition of Bitcoin states that it is a kind of digital currency which is transacted and regulated using encryption methods. This encryption techniques are used to regulated and verify the Bitcoin fund transfers.  Mining Bitcoin is a process of adding a bitcoin transaction to a public ledger of past transactions, which is also known as block chain. This block chain is responsible for confirming a valid Bitcoin transaction to the entire Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin mining is a record keeping activity for all bitcoin transactions. A Bitcoin miner is paid for the mining services of verifications of each bitcoin blocks received.

Bitcoin can be exchanged with other currencies like US Dollar, Euro, Yen etc. However many countries have not yet given the legal currency status to Bitcoin transaction. The Bitcoin price is dependent on the currency fluctuations. The Bitcoin value has fluctuated since its inception. During first hald of 2010, 1 BTC (bitcoin) was equivalent to less than $0.01 and during January 2014, 1 BTC was equivalent to $1000.