CoinDesk launches bitcoin information centre

CoinDesk has launched a bitcoin information centre designed to educate people about bitcoin. It contains guides on everything from the very basics of digital currency to how to set up your own bitcoin mining rig.

The guides target both beginners and intermediate bitcoin users, helping to boost their knowledge of key topics.

As we looked through online discussions about bitcoin and spoke to people outside the bitcoin world about the currency, frequent questions kept coming up. People didn't understand what gave bitcoin value, or where bitcoins came from. They had no idea how or where to buy them, and even less of a clue about how to spend them. So, CoinDesk decided to build a resource that would help provide the answers. We have conducted months of research to make sure our guides are exhaustive and contain the most important and up-to-date information.

The initial guides contained in the information centre are designed to get people started with the basics of mining, buying, and trading bitcoins. The following pages are accessible:

• What is bitcoin?
• Why use bitcoin?
• How can I buy bitcoins?
• How to store your bitcoins.
• Is bitcoin legal?
• How do bitcoin transactions work?
• How bitcoin mining works.
• How to set up a bitcoin miner.
• Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

The Satoshi page includes a piece of information that we hadn’t seen elsewhere, disproving the claim that bitcoin.org was originally registered in Finland. The Finland premise helped fuel one theory that three security experts authored the Bitcoin protocol (one of whom had travelled to Finland shortly before the website was registered). In fact, browsing a history of WHOIS registrations reveals that the site was originally registered in Japan, and only moved to Finland later.

CoinDesk has also produced a glossary of terms, designed to be the definitive dictionary for all things bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related. This glossary contains over 100 terms, covering not only the technology behind bitcoin, but also some fundamental economic terms, which are becoming more important as it matures and more sophisticated markets emerge. So, if you've ever wondered what an orphan block is, how the Buttonwood project got its name, or how OTC trading differs from a conventional exchange, you can find out about it here.

These guides are written in plain language, and designed not to be daunting. Bitcoin has historically been a difficult world for non-technical people to enter. Now, as more companies begin building commercial services around the currency, as legislators officially state that it is money, and as the industry engages regulators to help ease it into the mainstream, it is more important than ever that non-specialists are given easier access to the fundamental underlying concepts.

Access these guides to find out how a bitcoin wallet works (and how you can use paper to store a digital coin), how you can buy and spend bitcoins without ever having to go through the cumbersome paperwork involved with an exchange, who pays for bitcoin transactions and who reaps the rewards.

There are plenty of guides to look through now, but we'll continue adding more, so keep checking back to see what's new. If you think there is something missing or have an idea for a guide, please get in touch by emailing us at [email protected].