Re:Coinbase S-1
by soared on Thursday February 25, 2021 @10:27AM
(#26263746)
It’s a comparison to your traditional bank account. At chase bank you don’t physically own the money in your account - it’s in a banks database. With Bitcoin you own that coin and it’s stored in your own digital wallet. Like cash v bank account, but Bitcoin is safer and easier to store than cash.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Your Bitcoin is stored as an unspent transaction output (UTXO) in a globally distributed ledger (i.e. a database). But for most people the private key that would allow them to spend that Bitcoin is not actually in their possession - it's owned by Coinbase for example, who are acting as a bank and keep yet another database to store who owns what.