Should you buy or mine bitcoins?
What is mining? In traditional currencies, there is always a central bank backing up the currency and validating all the transactions. Bitcoin is a revolutionary decentralized currency system where some persons validate the transactions made by other persons and make sure no fraud is taking place. In order to do so, when a group of transactions take place in a certain period of time, these transactions are grouped in a block. The block needs to be appended to the already validated blocks in order to form what is called a blockchain. However, for the block to be added to the blockchain, it needs to be trusted: the miners role is to make sure that all the transactions in a block are valid and that no previously validated block in the blockchain was tempered with. This happens using computation algorithms that do the trick. As an incentive for miners to put their computing power to work, when a miner (or more realistically a pool of miners) discovers a block and validat...