How to enter the digital currency trading market

There are two ways to obtain the digital currency bitcoin, and the first is through mining. Bitcoin is designed to have a limited amount available. Kim Jin-hyung, a director at Coinone, a local digital currency trader, said mining is like solving difficult mathematical problems.

Miners can receive a certain amount of bitcoin after solving coded problems using computers. In the beginning, miners were able to get bitcoin using personal computers but the problems have become significantly more difficult as the amount of available currency is declining. At this point, mining bitcoin using a computer is almost impossible.

Professional miners are reportedly operating tens and hundreds of supercomputers to get bitcoin in countries like Mongolia, where electricity bills are cheap.

The typical way to get bitcoin is buying those that are already mined. In principle, transactions can only be made from peer to peer.

“I buy bitcoin at Bitcoin Center Korea located in Itaewon,” said a 33-year-old office worker surnamed Chang. Transactions are made offline at the center so no records remain. This type of transaction is hard to make right away. It takes time to arrange buyers and sellers and to have them negotiate on the price.

The more typical way to transfer is to use digital currency traders like Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit. At first, they only traded bitcoin but now they also manage Altcoin and Ethereum.

BY KO RAN [kim.youngnam@joongang.co.kr]