Hello everyone. I am quite new to Bitcoin, yet I do understand the basics. One of the questions I would like to be clarified is how the Bitcoin 'coins' are capped off at 21 million? What stops a hacker from just randomly creating new coins? And what is the difference between a block and a coin? Is a coin a shorter term for Bitcoin?
Good question! I believe that the Bitcoin rails are a decentralised ledger called the blockchain that is freely available in the cloud but what you can’t do is easily change it. A new block (think of it as a page in a ledger) is created every 10 minutes or so and contains all the transactions submitted by users since the last block was created. Each block has to be agreed by the community before it is added to the previous blocks, i.e. the block chain. Hope that helps!
