What is bitcoin?
Bitcoin, in essence, is money, it's a new kind of digital money. A digital money that allows payments to be made safely, cheaply, quickly and freely around the entire planet. Bitcoin is powerful and a masterpiece of engineering (or as Bill Gates says of it: "a technological feat"), but how much is a bitcoin worth? Why does your price go up and down so many times a day? Who determines your price? What security does that price have? Is it a scam, ponzi or strange mechanism to steal my money? (That everything has been heard)
Bitcoin as money..!!
As we all know, money is what is accepted as a means of payment for a good or a service. Good money is expected to serve as a unit of account and deposit of value among other characteristics. But ... a moment! If a money does not accept it as a means of payment, no matter how great it is as a unit of account, and everything you want ... is it worth something? That is why the value of money is not that it is closely linked to its acceptance, but is directly related. The FIAT money (which is the official money like the euros or dollars among others), as we know it today, are not more bills and coins without their own value, already very far from when they represented a value in gold. They are endorsed and certified only by issuing entities.
Mining Bitcoins..!!
In any traditional monetary system, governments simply print more money when they need it. As far as Bitcoin is concerned, it is not created, it is discovered. Thousands of computers around the world "mine" bitcoins competing with each other. The miners get the bitcoins as a reward for the resolution of a mathematical problem in which every 10 minutes compete thousands of nodes being the most powerful computer network that exists today (Yes, above even NSA or the almighty Google). This mathematical challenge is always the same in its process but the variables are different and can only be solved by trying random numbers without stopping until finding the result that is sought at that moment. The first one who gets it gets the reward. This generates competition and search for efficiency by improving computers for this purpose, which they call miners.
How to store bitcoins?
As we have already explained, Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P payment network. This means that there is no intermediary (such as a bank or company) that opens an account, if not that anyone can create an "account", and can have as many as you want without any cost. Accounts are called Bitcoin addresses, and they are always associated with a password or key that certifies that you are the owner of the corresponding address. In the same way that Paypal uses an email address as a unique identifier to associate a certain balance balance with a person or a bank uses your ID, in Bitcoin a Bitcoin address is used (It is unique, example: 1JArS6jzE3AJ9sZ3aFij1BmTcpFGgN86hA). And as in Paypal, in Bitcoin the identifier also has a password associated with it, which is more technically known as "private key" being mathematically associated to the Bitcoin address.
It will be at your Bitcoin address where you send the payments and that, thanks to the password, you can manage whenever you require it. These private keys are stored in programs that act as purses. Remember that Blockchain is an accounting book that associates balances with identifiers (Bitcoin addresses). This means that what the Bitcoin wallets actually store are not the bitcoins themselves, but the private keys that give you authorization to perform operations on the bitcoin addresses to which they are associated.
A phrase as common as saying "I have X bitcoins" is not technically true. The only thing that you have is the private keys capable of managing the addresses that have allocated X amount of bitcoins in the chain of blocks. This is one of the biggest curiosities of Bitcoin: bitcoins do not exist as such, only the records in Blockchain that have a balance associated. What is actually recorded and confirmed in the chain of blocks are the changes in ownership of the corresponding amounts between different addresses, the changes in the balance. These keys can be stored in various ways ranging from an APP for mobile or computer to simple pieces of paper, through online wallets. In any case it is essential to apply the highest number of security layers to avoid "scares".
You can calculate the price of your cryptime here:
https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator