What is Bit Coin

I think a lot of people are confused about all this terminology in Bit Coin, Crypto currency and Blockchain

This video will certainly help , especially for newbies

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. No one controls it.

Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by people, and increasingly businesses, running computers all around the world, using software that solves mathematical problems.

It’s the first example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin can be used to buy things electronically. In that sense, it’s like conventional dollars, euros, or yen, which are also traded digitally.

However, bitcoin’s most important characteristic, and the thing that makes it different to conventional money, is that it is decentralized.

No single institution controls the bitcoin network. This puts some people at ease, because it means that a large bank can’t control their money.

What is Bit coin based upon..

Conventional currency has been based on gold or silver. Theoretically, you knew that if you handed over a dollar at the bank, you could get some gold back (although this didn’t actually work in practice). But bitcoin isn’t based on gold; it’s based on mathematics.

Around the world, people are using software programs that follow a mathematical formula to produce bitcoins. The mathematical formula is freely available, so that anyone can check it.

The software is also open source, meaning that anyone can look at it to make sure that it does what it is supposed to.

Easy set up.

Conventional banks make you jump through hoops simply to open a bank account. Setting up merchant accounts for payment is another Kafkaesque task, beset by bureaucracy. However, you can set up a bitcoin address in seconds, no questions asked, and with no fees payable.

Its is transparent..

bitcoin stores details of every single transaction that ever happened in the network in a huge version of a general ledger, called the block-chain

It's Fast..

You can send money anywhere and it will arrive minutes later, as soon as the bitcoin network processes the payment.

More info can be found here http://www.coindesk.com/information/what-is-bitcoin/