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What is Bmkoin?

Bmkoin is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen. From a user perspective, Bmkoin is pretty much like cash for the Internet. Bmkoin can also be seen as the most prominent triple entry bookkeeping system in existence.

How does Bmkoin work?

From a user perspective, Bmkoin is nothing more than a mobile app or computer program that provides a personal Bmkoin wallet and allows a user to send and receive Bmkoins with them. This is how Bmkoin works for most users.

Behind the scenes, the Bmkoin network is sharing a public ledger called the "block chain". This ledger contains every transaction ever processed, allowing a user's computer to verify the validity of each transaction. The authenticity of each transaction is protected by digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses, allowing all users to have full control over sending Bmkoins from their own Bmkoin addresses. In addition, anyone can process transactions using the computing power of specialized hardware and earn a reward in Bmkoins for this service. This is often called "mining". To learn more about Bmkoin, you can consult the dedicated page and the original paper.

What is Bmkoin mining?

Mining is the process of spending computing power to process transactions, secure the network, and keep everyone in the system synchronized together. It can be perceived like the Bmkoin data center except that it has been designed to be fully decentralized with miners operating in all countries and no individual having control over the network. This process is referred to as "mining" as an analogy to gold mining because it is also a temporary mechanism used to issue new Bmkoins. Unlike gold mining, however, Bmkoin mining provides a reward in exchange for useful services required to operate a secure payment network. Mining will still be required after the last Bmkoin is issued.

How does one acquire Bmkoins?

• As payment for goods or services.
• Purchase Bmkoins at a Bmkoin exchange.
• Exchange Bmkoins with someone near you.
• Earn Bmkoins through competitive mining.

While it may be possible to find individuals who wish to sell Bmkoins in exchange for a credit card or PayPal payment, most exchanges do not allow funding via these payment methods. This is due to cases where someone buys Bmkoins with PayPal, and then reverses their half of the transaction. This is commonly referred to as a chargeback.

Is Bmkoin really used by people?

Yes. There are a growing number of businesses and individuals using Bmkoin. This includes brick-and-mortar businesses like restaurants, apartments, and law firms, as well as popular online services such as Namecheap and Overstock.com. While Bmkoin remains a relatively new phenomenon, it is growing fast. As of May 2018, the total value of all existing Bmkoins exceeded 100 billion US dollars, with millions of dollars worth of Bmkoins exchanged daily.

How difficult is it to make a Bmkoin payment?

Bmkoin payments are easier to make than debit or credit card purchases, and can be received without a merchant account. Payments are made from a wallet application, either on your computer or smartphone, by entering the recipient's address, the payment amount, and pressing send. To make it easier to enter a recipient's address, many wallets can obtain the address by scanning a QR code or touching two phones together with NFC technology.

What are the advantages of Bmkoin?

• Payment freedom - It is possible to send and receive Bmkoins anywhere in the world at any time. No bank holidays. No borders. No bureaucracy. Bmkoin allows its users to be in full control of their money.
• Choose your own fees - There is no fee to receive Bmkoins, and many wallets let you control how large a fee to pay when spending. Higher fees can encourage faster confirmation of your transactions. Fees are unrelated to the amount transferred, so it's possible to send 100,000 Bmkoins for the same fee it costs to send 1 Bmkoin. Additionally, merchant processors exist to assist merchants in processing transactions, converting Bmkoins to fiat currency and depositing funds directly into merchants' bank accounts daily. As these services are based on Bmkoin, they can be offered for much lower fees than with PayPal or credit card networks.
• Fewer risks for merchants - Bmkoin transactions are secure, irreversible, and do not contain customers’ sensitive or personal information. This protects merchants from losses caused by fraud or fraudulent chargebacks, and there is no need for PCI compliance. Merchants can easily expand to new markets where either credit cards are not available or fraud rates are unacceptably high. The net results are lower fees, larger markets, and fewer administrative costs.
• Security and control - Bmkoin users are in full control of their transactions; it is impossible for merchants to force unwanted or unnoticed charges as can happen with other payment methods. Bmkoin payments can be made without personal information tied to the transaction. This offers strong protection against identity theft. Bmkoin users can also protect their money with backup and encryption.
• Transparent and neutral - All information concerning the Bmkoin money supply itself is readily available on the block chain for anybody to verify and use in real-time. No individual or organization can control or manipulate the Bmkoin protocol because it is cryptographically secure. This allows the core of Bmkoin to be trusted for being completely neutral, transparent and predictable.

What are the disadvantages of Bmkoin?

• Degree of acceptance - Many people are still unaware of Bmkoin. Every day, more businesses accept Bmkoins because they want the advantages of doing so, but the list remains small and still needs to grow in order to benefit from network effects.
• Volatility - The total value of Bmkoins in circulation and the number of businesses using Bmkoin are still very small compared to what they could be. Therefore, relatively small events, trades, or business activities can significantly affect the price. In theory, this volatility will decrease as Bmkoin markets and the technology matures. Never before has the world seen a start-up currency, so it is truly difficult (and exciting) to imagine how it will play out.
• Ongoing development - Bmkoin software is still in beta with many incomplete features in active development. New tools, features, and services are being developed to make Bmkoin more secure and accessible to the masses. Some of these are still not ready for everyone. Most Bmkoin businesses are new and still offer no insurance. In general, Bmkoin is still in the process of maturing.

Is Bmkoin secure?

The Bmkoin technology - the protocol and the cryptography - has a strong security track record, and the Bmkoin network is probably the biggest distributed computing project in the world. Bmkoin's most common vulnerability is in user error. Bmkoin wallet files that store the necessary private keys can be accidentally deleted, lost or stolen. This is pretty similar to physical cash stored in a digital form. Fortunately, users can employ sound security practices to protect their money or use service providers that offer good levels of security and insurance against theft or loss.

Is Bmkoin legal?

To the best of our knowledge, Bmkoin has not been made illegal by legislation in most jurisdictions. However, some jurisdictions (such as Argentina and Russia) severely restrict or ban foreign currencies. Other jurisdictions (such as Thailand) may limit the licensing of certain entities such as Bmkoin exchanges.

Regulators from various jurisdictions are taking steps to provide individuals and businesses with rules on how to integrate this new technology with the formal, regulated financial system. For example, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau in the United States Treasury Department, issued non-binding guidance on how it characterizes certain activities involving virtual currencies.

• Virtual Currency Schemes - European Central Bank
• Application of FinCEN’s Regulations to Persons Administering, Exchanging, or Using Virtual Currencies

What about Bmkoin and taxes?

Bmkoin is not a fiat currency with legal tender status in any jurisdiction, but often tax liability accrues regardless of the medium used. There is a wide variety of legislation in many different jurisdictions which could cause income, sales, payroll, capital gains, or some other form of tax liability to arise with Bmkoin.

Is Bmkoin useful for illegal activities?

Bmkoin is money, and money has always been used both for legal and illegal purposes. Cash, credit cards and current banking systems widely surpass Bmkoin in terms of their use to finance crime. Bmkoin can bring significant innovation in payment systems and the benefits of such innovation are often considered to be far beyond their potential drawbacks.

Bmkoin is designed to be a huge step forward in making money more secure and could also act as a significant protection against many forms of financial crime. For instance, Bmkoins are completely impossible to counterfeit. Users are in full control of their payments and cannot receive unapproved charges such as with credit card fraud. Bmkoin transactions are irreversible and immune to fraudulent chargebacks. Bmkoin allows money to be secured against theft and loss using very strong and useful mechanisms such as backups, encryption, and multiple signatures.

Some concerns have been raised that Bmkoin could be more attractive to criminals because it can be used to make private and irreversible payments. However, these features already exist with cash and wire transfer, which are widely used and well-established. The use of Bmkoin will undoubtedly be subjected to similar regulations that are already in place inside existing financial systems, and Bmkoin is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted. In general, it is common for important breakthroughs to be perceived as being controversial before their benefits are well understood. The Internet is a good example among many others to illustrate this.

Is Bmkoin a bubble?

A fast rise in price does not constitute a bubble. An artificial over-valuation that will lead to a sudden downward correction constitutes a bubble. Choices based on individual human action by hundreds of thousands of market participants is the cause for Bmkoin's price to fluctuate as the market seeks price discovery. Reasons for changes in sentiment may include a loss of confidence in Bmkoin, a large difference between value and price not based on the fundamentals of the Bmkoin economy, increased press coverage stimulating speculative demand, fear of uncertainty, and old-fashioned irrational exuberance and greed.

Why do Bmkoins have value?

Bmkoins have value because they are useful as a form of money. Bmkoin has the characteristics of money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability) based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies). In short, Bmkoin is backed by mathematics. With these attributes, all that is required for a form of money to hold value is trust and adoption. In the case of Bmkoin, this can be measured by its growing base of users, merchants, and startups. As with all currency, Bmkoin's value comes only and directly from people willing to accept them as payment.

Is Bmkoin a Ponzi scheme?

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money, or the money paid by subsequent investors, instead of from profit earned by the individuals running the business. Ponzi schemes are designed to collapse at the expense of the last investors when there is not enough new participants.

Bmkoin is a free software project with no central authority. Consequently, no one is in a position to make fraudulent representations about investment returns. Like other major currencies such as gold, United States dollar, euro, yen, etc. there is no guaranteed purchasing power and the exchange rate floats freely. This leads to volatility where owners of Bmkoins can unpredictably make or lose money. Beyond speculation, Bmkoin is also a payment system with useful and competitive attributes that are being used by thousands of users and businesses.

Who created Bmkoin?

Bmkoin is the first implementation of a concept called "cryptocurrency", which was first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list, suggesting the idea of a new form of money that uses cryptography to control its creation and transactions, rather than a central authority. The first Bmkoin specification and proof of concept was published in 2009 in a cryptography mailing list by Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi left the project in late 2010 without revealing much about himself. The community has since grown exponentially with many developers working on Bmkoin.

Satoshi's anonymity often raised unjustified concerns, many of which are linked to misunderstanding of the open-source nature of Bmkoin. The Bmkoin protocol and software are published openly and any developer around the world can review the code or make their own modified version of the Bmkoin software. Just like current developers, Satoshi's influence was limited to the changes he made being adopted by others and therefore he did not control Bmkoin. As such, the identity of Bmkoin's inventor is probably as relevant today as the identity of the person who invented paper.

Can Bmkoins become worthless?

Yes. History is littered with currencies that failed and are no longer used, such as the German Mark during the Weimar Republic and, more recently, the Zimbabwean dollar. Although previous currency failures were typically due to hyperinflation of a kind that Bmkoin makes impossible, there is always potential for technical failures, competing currencies, political issues and so on. As a basic rule of thumb, no currency should be considered absolutely safe from failures or hard times. Bmkoin has proven reliable for years since its inception and there is a lot of potential for Bmkoin to continue to grow. However, no one is in a position to predict what the future will be for Bmkoin.

Is Bmkoin fully virtual and immaterial?

Bmkoin is as virtual as the credit cards and online banking networks people use everyday. Bmkoin can be used to pay online and in physical stores just like any other form of money. Bmkoins can also be exchanged in physical form such as the Denarium coins, but paying with a mobile phone usually remains more convenient. Bmkoin balances are stored in a large distributed network, and they cannot be fraudulently altered by anybody. In other words, Bmkoin users have exclusive control over their funds and Bmkoins cannot vanish just because they are virtual.

Why do people trust Bmkoin?

Much of the trust in Bmkoin comes from the fact that it requires no trust at all. Bmkoin is fully open-source and decentralized. This means that anyone has access to the entire source code at any time. Any developer in the world can therefore verify exactly how Bmkoin works. All transactions and Bmkoins issued into existence can be transparently consulted in real-time by anyone. All payments can be made without reliance on a third party and the whole system is protected by heavily peer-reviewed cryptographic algorithms like those used for online banking. No organization or individual can control Bmkoin, and the network remains secure even if not all of its users can be trusted.

Is Bmkoin anonymous?

Bmkoin is designed to allow its users to send and receive payments with an acceptable level of privacy as well as any other form of money. However, Bmkoin is not anonymous and cannot offer the same level of privacy as cash. The use of Bmkoin leaves extensive public records. Various mechanisms exist to protect users' privacy, and more are in development. However, there is still work to be done before these features are used correctly by most Bmkoin users.

Some concerns have been raised that private transactions could be used for illegal purposes with Bmkoin. However, it is worth noting that Bmkoin will undoubtedly be subjected to similar regulations that are already in place inside existing financial systems. Bmkoin cannot be more anonymous than cash and it is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted. Additionally, Bmkoin is also designed to prevent a large range of financial crimes.

To learn more about Bmkoin, please visit the complete FAQ or the Bmkoin Wiki.

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