Hi!
Been lurking here a bit, finally decided to sign up. There's some gap in my understanding of how bitoins work. I hope it's OK to ask here. Here it is:
1) In the real world, if I own $100 cash, I have one piece of paper with $100 written on it that proves this fact. In the bitcoin world, I don't have a piece of file that proves my ownership of some BTC, but rather there's a peer-to-peer network that traces all bitcoin transactions and tallying some of these transactions proves how much BTC I own. Is my understanding correct?
2) If I'm correct above, then would it take longer and longer to compute who owns how much BTC as more and more transactions have taken place?
Apologies if the above questions sound stupid. I've spent hours reading and even watching videos on how bitcoin works but alas I'm not a crypto or maths expert.
welcome
1) in online wallets for example your current holdings are displayed like money that is on your online banking account. same with bitcoins you have on your exchange account. (please do not keep significant amounts of bitcoins on online wallets or exchanges, and always use 2f authentification)
2) all transactions are stored forever and publicly in the blockchain. this blockchain is indeed growing with every transaction. if you download a bitcoin client software like bitcoin-qt it indeed takes longer now to download all past transactions than it did a year ago. but it does not matter when you move/send your bitcoins to another bitcoin adress: the computing of the this transaction is not done by your computer but instead by bitcoin miners (which are getting rewarded for doing this)
a very nice analogy is the piggy bank analogy:
https://medium.com/bitcoins-digital-currency/a9a8c094feaf
