A beginner’s guide to Bitcoin and how it could make you millions… or leave you with nothing

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Getty – Contributor Bitcoin has taken the financial world by storm, but is the cryptocurrency a way to make easy money or a bubble waiting to burst?

On that same day, if you had instead spent your £75 on a mysterious virtual currency named Bitcoin, you'd now be sitting on a pile of money worth £9.5MILLION.

Indeed, since those early days, the online money has multiplied in value – give or take – 125,000 times over.

Such is the investment value of Bitcoin, that Julian Assange claims it funded both him and Wikileaks when he was forced to invest in the currency as the result of US sanctions.

And financial experts reckon its value could skyrocket even further in the next few years.

So just how do you invest in the shadowy world of Bitcoin?

What is Bitcoin and how did it start?

Bitcoin became the world's first entirely virtual currency when it was introduced in January 2009.

Users cannot carry coins or notes and its value appears only as a number on a screen.

It was created by a shadowy online account which went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

New currency is created via a complex online process called mining which uses supercomputers to create new Bitcoins using complex computer code.

In its early days, Bitcoin proved relatively worthless – with one notorious example seeing an early pioneer paying for a pizza using two bitcoins.

15b8a7641b79a0828b6b2bfd188be53e A beginner’s guide to Bitcoin and how it could make you millions… or leave you with nothing

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