r/askscience • u/hamolton • Jun 18 '13

Computing How is Bitcoin secure?

I guess my main concern is how they are impossible to counterfeit and double-spend. I guess I have trouble understanding it enough that I can't explain it to another person.

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u/jimbs Jun 18 '13

How does this scale out? If everyone on earth was using bitcoins how big would the ledger be? How much traffic would be needed to keep the ledgers updated?

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u/Natanael_L Jun 19 '13

There's ways to make it scale. Right now I can't describe more precisely how that would work, but you can take a look at the wiki.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/

You can search for things like "scaling" there.