Governments could absolutely make Bitcoin illegal in their jurisdiction. In fact China has already done so, multiple times yet the ecosystem continues to flourish. Bitcoin’s distributed nature means that in reality it would require a monumental co-ordinated attack from many world powers to stem its growth.

It is cash, for the internet.

Bitcoin is money and any money can be used by criminals. In 2017 the entire drug trafficking market alone was estimated to be worth $500,000,000,000 (500 billion). At current prices that could buy the entire Bitcoin network 11 times over! It’s probably fair to say that the overwhelming majority of illicit activities are funded by fiat currencies.

At a network level yes, and lots of people have. There are literally hundreds of copies of Bitcoin, each usually with a minor tweak to its code to ‘improve’ it. Almost always these ‘improvements’ come with huge tradeoffs that prevent them from gaining any traction on Bitcoin’s massive network effects

It’s true that the Bitcoin network consumes a lot of power, but spending energy to secure and operate a global payments network that provides huge amounts of value to millions of people should not be seen as ‘wasteful’. Bitcoin mining has already started to push innovation in the use of alternative (often wasted) energy sources such as flared gas or renewables.

At the time of writing there are a little over 18 million bitcoins that have been mined. There will only ever be 21 million and the final one will be mined around the year 2140. Each bitcoin can be subdivided into 100 million Satoshis or ‘sats’ so there are plenty to go around.

New bitcoins are created as a result of the globally distributed and highly competitive mining process. Each newly mined block rewards the successful miner with a subsidy. At the time of writing, this subsidy has just been halved to 6.25 bitcoins. It will halve again to 3.125 bitcoins after another 210,000 blocks or roughly 4 years.

The process of participants contributing large amounts of computing power to process transactions into blocks. Once they have grouped these transactions a miner performs a repetitive computational task on them to try and find an answer that is below a certain target. If they are successful, the block is mined and the miner receives the transaction fees and block subsidy. The process then starts again and the next batch of transactions.

There are lots of online exchanges that you can buy bitcoin from although you should do your own due diligence when finding somewhere to buy from. The best way to get your first piece of bitcoin is to buy some from a trusted friend or family member. Remember – You can buy a fraction of a bitcoin (there are 100 million sats in each one)!