Obscure Bitcoin Questions Answered

People ask a range of odd, obscure, and interesting questions about bitcoin online. We thought it would be interesting to explore some of these and find some of the answers to these commonly asked questions. So read on and find out if you know the answer to these obscure bitcoin questions and perhaps learn a thing or two as well.

What Language is Bitcoin Written In?

The original bitcoin codebase was written in a popular, well-established language called C++. This choice helps to retain robust control over memory management and form a good balance between a very low-level language like assembly while still being very powerful, stable, and well maintained. A lot of software you use daily is likely programmed in C++, as are many games you’ve probably played over the years.

How Can I Recover Bitcoin Wallet?

One of the benefits of bitcoin is the security of your wallet. It’s very difficult to brute force a wallet without any information about the private key or seed phrase. Even having a few words missing from your seed phrase or being out of order can make it incredibly hard to recover access to your wallet. Many scammers online will claim to be able to regain access to your bitcoin “for a fee” or try to manipulate you into handing over other sensitive information they could potentially use against you, don’t fall for this.

How High Can Bitcoin Go?

Presumably, this question will typically be about bitcoin’s price and how high it might go in the future. Future price is impossible to estimate with any degree of certainty. It would be best to assume that anyone making future bitcoin price predictions uses their own bias and speculation. Nevertheless, if faith and belief in bitcoin continue to grow and more users begin adopting and using bitcoin, the price is likely to follow along by increasing as well.

As bitcoin is limited in emissions as it is mined and due to a known cap on the total supply of 21 million, there’s only so much to go around. It’s fair to assume that with increased adoption, price should follow; anything much beyond this is pure speculation.

When Should I Sell My Bitcoin?

If you are worried about the right time to sell your bitcoin, perhaps you have invested more in bitcoin than you are comfortable with; if this is the case, consider reducing your exposure to bitcoin or crypto in general. It’s also worth considering that you can always sell part of your bitcoin. You don’t have to sell all of it when reducing your amount of bitcoin exposure. The right time to sell (if ever) is based on your aversion to risk.

If you can afford to risk bitcoin’s volatility, this will likely be of less concern to you. Still, if you are worried about the best time to sell bitcoin, perhaps you should spend a little time evaluating your investment and personal finance strategies to ensure you are comfortable with your current positions.

Is Now a Good Time to Buy Bitcoin?

The internet is rife with people offering unlicensed financial advice. You rarely know the actual experience behind the opinions someone is offering you online (no matter what history they claim to have). The best way to decide if it’s the right time to buy bitcoin for you is to look at the history of bitcoin and then develop your sentiment based on current and past events. Do you expect regulations to be fair in terms of bitcoin in the future? Do you think more people will begin using bitcoin as time goes on? If the answer is yes to these and other similar questions, then perhaps now is a great time to buy bitcoin, but always do your research and decide for yourself.

How Do I Use a Bitcoin ATM?

There are a couple of answers to this one. The best one, though, in most cases, is simply that you shouldn’t unless you have no other alternatives, which, if you have access to a bitcoin ATM, is quite unlikely. Bitcoin ATMs can be expensive and encourage the use of these devices known for their incredibly high margins. Choosing not to use a bitcoin ATM can help save you money and promote these owners of these devices to be more competitive and reasonable in price, helping those around you. Skip the bitcoin ATM and trade P2P instead.

How Do I Tell if I Have a Bitcoin Miner Virus?

If you are concerned that you may be infected with malware that is using your computer’s resources to mine a cryptocurrency, you probably have already noticed some issues with how hard your device is running while it should be sitting idle or struggling to perform tasks that are usually simple for the machine. Worth noting is that this type of malware often doesn’t actually mine bitcoin (a common misconception), as mining bitcoin using typical home computer hardware is typically not very practical since the proliferation of ASICs explicitly designed to mine bitcoin. Instead, cryptocurrencies still viable using CPU mining are usually the target for these attacks focusing on cryptocurrencies such as monero instead of bitcoin.

If you are concerned, that you may be infected with malware, sometimes the best thing to do is back up essential documents and complete a fresh install of your operating system. If this isn’t something, you are comfortable doing yourself, consult an IT professional in your area for help or do some research online until you understand the process. If you can find and isolate the issue with a quality antivirus, this can be another approach. Even if you do a fresh install, it may be worth scanning your backups if you have concerns about viruses and malware.

How Do I Mine Bitcoin Gold?

This is an oddly common question you see people asking online, perhaps due to some confusion regarding what bitcoin gold actually is in the first place. Bitcoin gold is not a form of gold or bitcoin; it is a bitcoin network fork similar to bitcoin cash, bitcoin SV, and many other forks that have occurred throughout the life of bitcoin.

If you are considering mining or otherwise investing your time or money into a fork of bitcoin, be sure to analyze the project to find a reason you think is valid to invest your resources in support. Avoid making decisions on claims about anything other than BTC being the “true bitcoin” or “the way bitcoin was supposed to be.”

How Long Does it Take to Buy Bitcoin?

The amount of time it takes to buy bitcoin can vary, primarily on how you choose to do it. Some centralized order-book-style exchanges require significant time to get signed up and be able to start trading. If you instead opt to trade P2P using a platform like LocalCoinSwap, you may find that the process can be swift and straightforward. Sign up to LocalCoinSwap, and in a few moments, you can be trading bitcoin worldwide with a vast range of payment methods making it fast and convenient for you.

How Can I Read Bitcoin Charts?

This is a moderately broad question, but the most common way it is asked is by using technical analysis to try and understand market movements. While technical analysis is something that some people place more faith in than others, you can use a range of indicators to help you make a more informed decision about where the market is going based on previous or current behaviors.

Remember when using TA to analyze bitcoin or anything else that no indicator is perfect and that they should only ever be used in conjunction with your sentiment. You can find a range of free material online if learning how to “read” candlestick charts is of interest to you. There’s no need to throw money at “trading influencers” to learn the basics; this is something anyone can do with a bit of time and patience on their own.

What Happens to Unconfirmed Bitcoin Transactions?

Unconfirmed bitcoin transactions start in the mempool. However, if a transaction contains a fee so low that it struggles to get confirmed, it will eventually get dropped and become spendable in most cases, but this will take quite a bit of time. There are ways to help get a stuck bitcoin transaction confirmed, such as child-pays-for-parent or replace-by-fee transactions.

To learn more about unconfirmed bitcoin transactions, we have a great article that further delves into the subject. Learn more from our article “how long do bitcoin transactions take?”

Why is Bitcoin Not a Bubble?

At over a decade old now, Bitcoin has proven itself to be secure, stable, and to have many use cases. It didn’t just start the surge of interest in blockchain technology; it is still at the forefront of blockchain, remaining the most well-known and established cryptocurrency. While price can go up and down, bitcoin has recovered from many significant price corrections showing continued support and growth of this interesting asset.

Bitcoin puts the tools to take control of your stored value back into your hands, allows for remittance without third parties, and much more. Bitcoin is not the modern age’s tulip mania; it is part of what makes the modern world great.

How Long Would it Take to Mine a Bitcoin?

While not a simple question to answer in the generic sense, it is an interesting question to explore to help better understand bitcoin at a more fundamental level. The time it would take to mine a bitcoin will depend on several factors.

Firstly, the hash rate you have at your disposal while mining bitcoin. Secondly, whether you are mining on your own or as part of a pool, mining as part of a pool can help make your returns far more consistent. The other important thing to take into account is the current difficulty. The difficulty controls how hard solving a block will be, which will vary depending on how many miners (and their combined hash rate) compete on the network at any time. To some degree, it’s worth taking luck into account as well. Will you or your pool be able to solve the next block faster than other miners and pools?

A range of estimators online can help you estimate the returns from specific mining equipment. One important thing to remember is that bitcoin mining is almost purely performed with the help of specialty equipment called ASIC miners. These miners are designed to do one thing well, in the case of bitcoin ASIC miners, to mine bitcoin as effectively as possible.

Bitcoin mining can be a pretty dense topic, so don’t consider this answer the complete guide to mining bitcoin. Instead, to learn more, consider reading our article dedicated to cryptocurrency and bitcoin mining to learn more about the basics of bitcoin mining that you will learn from this short answer to this single question.

How to Mine Bitcoin on a Mac?

Mining bitcoin on a computer running macOS will likely be impractical, as the current difficulty of mining bitcoin exceeds the ability of consumer computer hardware that isn’t specialized to do so with any reasonable degree of efficiency.

However, you will find many mining clients for other cryptocurrencies that will allow you to mine various types of crypto on MacOS on Apple devices. In addition, a vast range of cryptocurrencies can still be mined using consumer CPUs and GPUs, and these can often be traded for bitcoin using exchanges that list them.

Why are Bitcoin Fees so High?

The bitcoin network’s average fee varies based mostly on network activity and how competitive it is to get your transaction into the next block. What is considered high will differ from person to person and the amount you are trying to move. If you are trying to move a small amount of bitcoin, the fee will likely be a far more considerable concern to you than someone trying to move a large amount of bitcoin on the network.

If you aren’t in a rush, you can spend some time estimating a fee. Just be sure that you will likely get your transaction confirmed in a reasonable time frame that suits you to reduce your spending a little, or you can wait until network congestion is at a relative minimum. The bitcoin network’s security is thanks to the miners and node operators worldwide, who all contribute to the strength of the network. For them, this is often not a cheap thing to get involved in, so these fees help ensure that miners are incentivized to continue providing the security we love from the bitcoin network.

How Old Do You Have to Be to Buy Bitcoin?

Unlike many financial services and tools from the traditional realm, bitcoin doesn’t discriminate. If you are capable of sending and receiving bitcoin, you are capable of using bitcoin. The problem you may face is your local regulations regarding who can use bitcoin exchanges in your region and the restrictions on each platform.

If you are unable to trade bitcoin due to being excluded for whatever reason, P2P trading may be able to help you become more independent, even if you are a little younger. Just be sure that your parents or guardians are aware of your delving into the bitcoin space if you are a bit younger and take advantage of their life experiences to help avoid scams and other hazards that come with the online world, not just bitcoin.

What is the Difference Between Bitcoin and Ethereum?

Bitcoin and ethereum are similar in many ways, but of course, they do have their differences. For example, while bitcoin is more focused on being a pure cryptocurrency and doing this exceptionally well, ethereum focuses on other areas like support for tokens and smart contracts.

The power of smart contracts has allowed for the boom in DeFi projects and much more on the ethereum network. Creating tokens on top of the ethereum network has allowed many projects, including LocalCoinSwap, to avoid reinventing the wheel to create a digital asset. The best for you will likely come down to what you are trying to achieve and your general preferences. Research both and determine which blockchain technologies are the right fit for your use case.

How to Withdraw Money from Bitcoin?

Unlike a bank, you can’t go to your local “bitcoin branch” and withdraw money. However, you can sell your bitcoin using a P2P marketplace like LocalCoinSwap and get cash for your bitcoin! So instead of having to use a bank with bitcoin, you can be your own bank. This ability of bitcoin is one of those great things about bitcoin that are a feature rather than something lacking.

Empower yourself with bitcoin’s help and increase that further with the flexibility of trading P2P using the most popular marketplace for P2P trading, LocalCoinSwap.

How Do Bitcoin Faucets Work?

A bitcoin faucet typically pays out a small amount of bitcoin if you interact with the site every so many minutes (commonly 15 minutes or an hour). Bitcoin faucets have been around for quite a long time. The first bitcoin faucet was developed by Gavin Andresen way back in 2010 and, at the start, was dispensing 5 BTC per visitor, something that, if you still held these days, would be a significant amount of value. However, due to the significant increases in bitcoin value these days, you’ll typically see bitcoin faucets only offering a few satoshis at once.

Typically, bitcoin faucets are funded by advertising and payout such small amounts that they can make a profit ideally. At the same time, they will often run additional raffles and things they will usually try and bait you into spending your collected bitcoin on coin flip games and the like. Like anything, beware of enormous promises for low effort; these are businesses, not charities, after all.

How Can I Start a Bitcoin Exchange?

Starting a bitcoin exchange can be a tremendous amount of work. You’ll require significant development, marketing, customer service staff, and more. However, if you leverage an existing platform, you can start a trading business and start making bitcoin trading profitable through a P2P exchange like LocalCoinSwap.

Becoming a vendor is something that anyone can do with a bit of research and time spent investigating the various ways to serve your customers efficiently. Traders use P2P exchanges worldwide to operate their form of bitcoin exchange businesses, many of which have grown significantly successful.

How Could I Earn Bitcoin Without Mining?

There are various ways to earn bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies without mining them. Thanks to bitcoin becoming more widely used, you can find a range of jobs to microtasks that will pay in bitcoin. You can also sell your goods and services and accept payment in bitcoin. You could do everything from selling small crafts to large business transactions that could be performed with bitcoin. You could also just start routinely putting some of your money into bitcoin if that is a viable option in your scenario. The best way to earn bitcoin is the way that suits you best!

How to Convert Bitcoin to Ethereum?

One great way is to use the fast crypto swaps feature implemented on LocalCoinSwap. You can swap to bitcoin, ethereum, and an extensive range of other cryptocurrencies at a moment’s notice. You don’t require anything other than an account on LocalCoinSwap. So get registered and start swapping today.

Is it Possible to Hedge Bitcoin?

People like to hedge against bitcoin in a range of ways. Some people simply vary their exposure by buying and selling bitcoin-based on their sentiment towards the market conditions. Others use stablecoins as a form of hedge against the market price dropping. Many people also use margin trading to hedge a bitcoin position, which can be significantly high risk. One way to hedge against bitcoin is to ensure you are comfortably diversified into whatever else you feel is right for you.

How to Clone Bitcoin?

If you have some development experience or want to learn more about how bitcoin works on a deeper level, you can clone the bitcoin core repository over GitHub. Suppose you are experimenting with making your own cryptocurrency. In that case, you may find making your own ethereum token a little more practical if you don’t have the resources to sustain a new network or the support to do so. As the bitcoin core code is MIT licensed, you can pretty freely do as you choose with it and create your bitcoin fork, as many people have done over time.

How Much Bandwidth Does Bitcoin Mining Use?

While mining can have significant power requirements, especially at scale, surprisingly, it doesn’t require much internet bandwidth to mine bitcoin. People have successfully mined with dial-up speeds, and even larger-scale farms don’t generally require a significant connection to provide their mining rigs with the required bandwidth. Streaming a movie on Netflix will use far more than you would mining bitcoin.

Why Does Bitcoin Value Fluctuate?

You may be surprised to know that the value of most things you deal with or consume in your life does fluctuate. However, unless the fluctuations are dramatic in the short term, you often won’t notice this price variance too much on most items. For example, if you look at a product like bread, it contains a range of ingredients that vary in cost depending on availability. Still, unless one of the necessary items changes dramatically, you are unlikely to see the price of bread rise tenfold overnight. Even if it did, you’d probably find things get interesting quickly as people moved to other forms of bread that weren’t affected by the price rise.

Bitcoin is a speculative asset, and in the grand scheme of things, it is relatively new compared to long-established assets like gold. Newer assets will almost always be more volatile as the market consensus slowly builds to a more consistent price discovery level. While bitcoin still has quite explosive movements, the volume being traded recently has reduced the market’s extremes to some degree; this will likely improve with continued adoption. The dynamics of mining, regulations, and much more can affect bitcoin cost and result in short or long-term fluctuations.

How to Find Lost Bitcoin?

If you’ve lost track of some bitcoin, the best thing you can do is look for where you may have stored the wallet (or better yet, backups of your wallet or recovery phrase). Unfortunately, if you have lost access to your private key, you will no longer be able to move that bitcoin.

However, if you just think that perhaps you misplaced some check any exchange accounts you have, mobile wallets, your PC, and anywhere else you may have been storing cryptocurrency wallets. Then, if you manage to find it or still have other bitcoin to worry about, consider this a great time to make sure you can keep track and securely backup any essential account logins, wallets, or recovery phrases.

How to Get Bitcoin Back from a Scammer?

Unless you can take legal action that forces the scammer to hand over access to the bitcoin, your chances are incredibly slim of ever seeing that bitcoin again. What makes this worse is other types of scammers prey on the victims of cryptocurrency scams offering fake “recovery services” that require you to hand over sensitive information for them to use further to steal from you.

If you fall for a bitcoin scam that results in losing some or all of your bitcoin, explore any legal options, you may have and consider it a hard lesson learned. Trying “alternative” ways to get it back will likely just result in your being scammed again in some other way. One of the great things about bitcoin is the finality of transactions once confirmed. Don’t let scammers use this against you, and ensure you educate yourself about the common bitcoin scams that are doing the rounds. Thankfully, most of them are relatively easy to spot.

How Does Bitcoin Affect the Economy?

When it comes to this question, the first thing to consider is which economy you view this as concerning. In a country like Venezuela, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can significantly affect the economy. Crypto becomes a tool for capital flight, allowing people to remove value from an unstable economic situation and protect themselves from hyperinflation.

While bitcoin can be volatile, surprisingly, it can be less volatile than some economies dealing with hyperinflation and other economic concerns. While for more stable economies, it’s hard to say what the effects are right now, as the use of bitcoin increases, it may also have a significant impact on major economies of the world. Only a tiny percent of the average population currently uses bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, so the best way to see the effects is to look at countries dealing with economic instability.

Why Do Bitcoin Exchanges Have Different Prices?

Firstly you have to consider that each exchange is largely a walled garden of sorts. As traders buy and sell inside, they will typically somewhat follow other exchanges’ sentiment; however, this will not be the same across the board. This gets interesting, though, because arbitrage bitcoin traders will trade these price spreads and close the gaps to profit themselves. So things do start to vary more significantly in regional exchange.

If an exchange operates in a country with different rules, taxes, and market dynamics, crypto prices inside and outside can differ considerably. If it’s difficult to buy bitcoin, the price can get far higher; if it’s easier, lower, but this will typically be arbitraged quite quickly by traders that have the ability to arbitrage across exchanges that are on both sides of the price spectrum.

What is the Smallest Amount of Bitcoin I Can Buy?

Technically you can buy a single satoshi (0.00000001 BTC), but the problem would be if you ever wanted to move it, you’d run into a situation where the mining fees were more than the amount of bitcoin you had. A more realistic amount would be around $2 USD in bitcoin, which would cover a small mining fee, and although it’s not ideal, you can do it.

How Can You Buy a House with Bitcoin?

In theory, there’s no reason why you can just buy a house with bitcoin. However, a few things make buying a home with bitcoin outright a little challenging. Firstly, the volatility can be problematic if the final sale is pending for a while. Depending on where you live (or plan to live), it can also make taxes and other forms of compliance a bit more complicated.

The easiest way to buy a house with bitcoin is merely selling the bitcoin required to complete the purchase. Using a P2P exchange like LocalCoinSwap allows you to source liquidity from several different vendors, or you could always become a vendor yourself and perhaps even make some money to put towards buying your house.

While buying a house with crypto can be a little tricky today, there are plenty of things you can already buy using bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies, which are only increasing with time.

What are Bitcoin Confirmations?

Until a bitcoin transaction has made it into a block, it can be considered unconfirmed. Once it is included in a block, this is regarded as the first confirmation. Every time a new block is created beyond that, you can look at it as adding an additional confirmation.

Often users or platforms you use will expect at least two confirmations to accept the bitcoin as received. The more confirmations made, the harder it would be to try and create a double-spend or otherwise revert the transaction. With the bitcoin network’s sheer scale these days, three confirmations can be considered significantly secure for most use cases. Some businesses may accept single confirmation transactions for small purchases to save time, but this is not ideal for larger higher-risk purchases, so consider this when deciding what you deem as received regarding the number of confirmations.

How to Become a Bitcoin Millionaire?

It depends on what you consider a bitcoin millionaire; one fun way to look at it is that you could accumulate 1 million satoshis (or 0.01 BTC). But, of course, the other way is the more generic sense you stack enough to have a million dollars in your local currency.

There’s no guaranteed way to become a bitcoin millionaire other than merely buying enough bitcoin to hold that much value. While many schemes out there will promise huge gains and guaranteed returns, these are typically scams that should be avoided.

How to Bet Against Bitcoin?

Are you one of those who don’t believe in bitcoin long-term, or perhaps you simply just expect bitcoin to go down in the short term? In either case, you can do a few things to technically “bet” against bitcoin. If you hold bitcoin already, the first is to reduce your exposure to bitcoin by selling some (a great way is to use LocalCoinSwap). Another way is to use margin trading to short bitcoin.

Margin trading can be hazardous, and you can lose money quickly if you aren’t careful. Similarly, CFD (contracts for difference) can be used on some platforms to short bitcoin. However, these are even higher risks and can result in debts that exceed your trading account’s value.

What Time Does the Bitcoin Market Close?

It doesn’t; unlike some traditional markets, bitcoin trades actively 24/7, 365 days a year. So it doesn’t matter if you’re sitting up at 3 am or getting some quick trades in at lunch; you can freely trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

How to Buy a Fraction of a Bitcoin?

If you are new to cryptocurrency, you may not know that you don’t have to buy a whole bitcoin to get involved. Instead, you can purchase tiny portions of bitcoin with minimal issue. Bitcoins are divisible, similarly to how you would look at cents to a dollar; there are satoshis to a bitcoin.

Unlike the dollar, though bitcoin has eight decimal places allowing you to deal with small or large amounts of value quite quickly, one bitcoin contains 100 million satoshis. So if you want to purchase a small amount of bitcoin, a range of traders from across the world are looking to trade right now on LocalCoinSwap!