Bitcoin is a virtual currency. It doesn't exist in the kind of physical form that the currency & coin we're used to exist in. It doesn't even exist in a form as physical as Monopoly money. It's electrons - not molecules.

But consider how much cash you personally handle. You get a paycheck that you take to the bank - or it's autodeposited without you even seeing the paper that it's not printed on. You then use a debit card (or a checkbook, if you're old school) to access those funds. At best, you see 10% of it in a cash form in your pocket or in your pocketbook. So, it turns out that 90% of the funds that you manage are virtual - electrons in a spreadsheet or database.

But wait - those are U.S. funds (or those of whatever country you hail from), safe in the bank and guaranteed by the full faith of the FDIC up to about $250K per account, right? Well, not exactly. Your financial institution may only required to keep 10% of its deposits on deposit. In some cases, it's less. It lends the rest of your money out to other people for up to 30 years. It charges them for the loan, and charges you for the privilege of letting them lend it out.

How does money get created?

Your bank gets to create money by lending it out. …show more content…
The nodes / computers doing the calculations on the ledger are rewarded for doing so. For each set of successful calculations, the node is rewarded with a certain amount of BitCoin ("BTC"), which are then newly generated into the BitCoin ecosystem. Hence the term, "BitCoin Miner" - because the process creates new BTC. As the supply of BTC increases, and as the number of transactions increases, the work necessary to update the public ledger gets harder and more complex. As a result, the number of new BTC into the system is designed to be about 50 BTC (one block) every 10 minutes,