No locker can ever be broken into. If you never share the locker key, no one else can open it, for sure. It's Amazing and safe.

There is no Top Control computer that stores all the money, no big "safe" to break into. (There are business computers offering to let you use their lockers, or offering to hold your locker keys for you. But it's probably safer to keep your money in your own locker, and keep your own locker keys on your own computer so no one can see them. A key looks a lot like a locker name long numbers and letters together. You could maybe remember it, but most people just keep it safe inside their computer.)

Since a Top Control computer is not safe, instead there is a huge complete and perfect memory book that stores all the facts of all the money that everyone has and pays.

Some Spend Facts in The Blockchain

Date Money From To 01/19/12 11 1KZoUuPWFAeyVySHAGqvTUDoX6P3ntuLNF 1KgTQAkmd5JzV6hQzFiCt4F5HyQAief7Q 02/14/13 3.29 1A8JiWcwvpY7tAopUkSnGuEYHmzGYfZPiq 1KgTQAkmd5JzV6hQzFiCt4F5HyQAief7Q 02/15/14 7.0000331 1KgTQAkmd5JzV6hQzFiCt4F5HyQAief7Q 1KZoUuPWFAeyVySHAGqvTUDoX6P3ntuLNF 06/09/14 22000.00 1KZoUuPWFAeyVySHAGqvTUDoX6P3ntuLNF 1A8JiWcwvpY7tAopUkSnGuEYHmzGYfZPiq

World-wide free perfect memory book of up-to-date facts that anyone can see any time, and

No one can change the past facts.

how much bitcoin you are sending,

the time you are sending it,

the locker you are sending from, and of course

the locker you are sending it to.

bitcoin

bitcoins

bitcoins

bitcoin

bitcoin

Sometimes when I try to answer Bitcoin questions the eyes of the other person turn off. I used the wrong words. So I've wrote a piece to explain Bitcoin to a five year old ELI5 . That was hard but I wanted to take it further. Here is a way to explain the back-end parts using only the ten hundred most used words . It was hard to write, and a high bar, but fun . Please share it with new people.With bitcoin the new computer money, all the money is in people's lockers, like a big wall of school lockers going up ten hundred stories and so long it goes as far as you can see. Lots and lots of lockers! School lockers have short names like 14F. Bitcoin locker names are longer, such as: 14FxxAkmd5JzV6hQzFiCt4F5HyQAief7Q (Bitcoin lockers always begin with "1"). It looks funny but you get used to it.Anyone can send money into any other locker they want by just writing the locker name, but you can only take something out if you have the key. If you have the locker key then you can open the locker and send some money to any other locker, almost free, in a minute or less.Everyone can always see and know when it arrives. The money never gets lost or disappears. It can only go from one locker to another. Everyone can always see what locker it went to.Like sending computer letters, it's easy to do, so when you see it you get how to do it within a few minutes of looking around.The cool things about the safe parts are:Exactly right. So this is the new cool and simple answer to that problem: Instead of keeping the Complete Memory Book of Spend Facts in one spot, it's put onto everyone's computer, open and free to take! So there are many hundreds and hundreds of the Complete Memory Book all over the world. The Complete Memory Book of Spend Facts is called the "blockchain".If a bad guy wants to break or change the facts in the blockchain they have to break into many hundreds and hundreds of computers all over the world in just a few minutes and change them all. It's not possible! So bitcoins are safe from taking, safe from changing how much someone has, and safe from anyone changing past spend facts. No one can grab everyone's names, phone numbers, house numbers or card numbers because these are not in the blockchain. The blockchain only has dates and money and locker numbers, like this.This is the big cool new important amazing idea people are excited about:With that, you can can do a lot of amazing new stuff, not just money.Okay. Every time someone spends some bitcoin, these spend facts are added on to the blockchain:That's it. These new facts are added to the end of the blockchain and then these changes jump to all the many hundreds and hundreds of computers all over the world with everyone telling everyone until everyone knows.Good point, the Bitcoin blockchain is around 20gb and growing . If you down-save the Bitcoin directions on your own computer, the first thing it will do is start down-saving that huge blockchain onto memory. It takes a couple days.Yes you can! But there's no names or anything in there; only locker names. If you know someone's locker name, yes, you can check their money. Try it. It's fun. You can see the real live blockchain at blockchain.info. (Easier than looking into the one on your computer.) You can make new lockers at any time on your own computer. They're free and everyone can make as many as they want. When you send money, the facts must be added onto the blockchain so everyone knows. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who add the new facts to the blockchain and then leave their computers almost always turned on to send the changes out to the rest of the world. If they do it long enough, then sooner or later they will get free money as a little thank you. This is what "mining" is.True, so here's the weird part, but a good idea. If you want to help then you must show that you're serious by playing Guess the Number (seriously). All the people helping have to try to guess a very long number. They keep guessing until someone gets it right. (The faster their computer is, the sooner they can guess the number.) It seems stupid, I know. It is a little stupid. It's just busy-work. But it clears away all the people who are not serious. This is how they show that they really want to help and you can trust them and their computer will almost always be turned on and helping all the others pass around all the new spend facts.No, but close. The ones who guess the right number get a chance to get the free money. Only one will get it. But everyone knows that they will get it sooner or later as long as they keep helping and playing. But playing Guess the Number makes your computer slow, and uses lots of power which is not exactly free. So that's why not everyone does it- only if they want to take it seriously. (Who's probably doing a lot of mining? Guys who can use free computers that are always on and with free power. So that's like, your computer guy at the office on the night shift.)That's the answer to the question, "how did bitcoin pop up so fast?" Because in the beginning there was a lot more free thank-you money flying around and not as many people playing Guess the Number, so it was easy to jump in and "mine" and get a whole lot! You couldn't buy too much at the time.Not much to buy, but it was fun to throw around between each other for lunch or whatever. With bitcoin today though, it's almost not possible to mine because everyone else playing Guess the Number has hundreds of seriously fast computers. So if you just have normal computers you will never guess it before them.It's too late to mine bitcoin, yes. People don't even use their home computers any more. Now there are computers made exactly to do only one thing: to play Guess the Number, and they can't even do anything else! It's an arms race for the few groups of people helping who are still in the game. Your computer could never guess the number first. This was not expected. The one who thought up Bitcoin didn't see this coming and it's a little sad. It should have been much cooler with any computer (even yours) to at least have a chance to help and grab a bit of free money. But even though it didn't turn out as planned, the important thing is, it still works all of the new spend-facts in the world, every second, get added to the blockchain on hundreds and hundreds of computers all the time and can't be changed.When it became too hard to mine bitcoin, lots of people thought, "Hey why not start over?" They grabbed the free computer directions that made bitcoin, and changed a few things around in order to make up their own money like Litecoin, Dogecoin, and a hundred more. Why not? Let's see what happens. Many of these newer ones use different kinds of busy-work (not always Guess the Number) that keeps the arms race guys from using their weird single-minded computers and getting such a huge push. So they give the normal computer at least a shot at joining in to help. If you want to "mine" Dogecoins or Litecoins on your house computer you can do it today! (I'm just mentioning Doge because those guys often help a lot and throw the Doge money around so it's easy to start learning even if you're 14.)It's a huge interesting world like the early time when computers were just starting to talk to each other, with lots of ideas jumping into everyone's mind, and way more that have not even been thought of yet, of things you can do with a free perfect book of up-to-date facts that can't be changed that anyone can read, or can add to with a time/date that is always right, and no one can ever change or kill any facts (or the whole book). (It's also very safe from wrong/bad facts because if a computer sees two spend-facts books and for some reason they are different, it will pick the biggest one, the one with the most spend-facts, because that is probably the most new.) This was never possible before. Just this part could be used for lots of other stuff besides money. Keeping perfect people/animal/business/city/land facts/deals about anything.If you have ever used PGP or GPG then you will easily see how the money lockers work. Your money locker name is what you tell everyone so they can send you money, but your money locker key is never shared. You keep that safe. That money locker key is what you want to guard and hide and not store on some outside computer. If you lose it and have no back-up, bad news: it would not be possible to spend your money and it will be locked inside your locker until the end of time. You could see how much you have, but you could never open it to spend that money, and money that can't be spent has no use.No. Money can't go back out. It's not possible. It can only go out if you have the keys. Without the keys it's a one-way locker. Also, even if you lost the keys to ten hundred hundredThey still can't help you. The reason why is the best part of: there is no Them. It's not a business, no city and no group. It's just a set of directions in computers Some guy wrote the directions, we looked at it, played with it, ran it, and here it is, still working, years later, never lost a. If you want to read the whole white paper , it's only four times longer than this, not that long. You can probably get most of it.Thanks for reading. If you don't like some part, tell me so I can make it better. But remember I made this to ELI5 and with only a set of ten hundreds words. If you want to share it please talk about me and send people here to see!If you have any questions, I can try to answer here with only the ten hundred most used words.

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