Bitcoin is one of the world’s most popular crypto-currencies, and there is still a lot of interest and optimism in developing the virtual currency further despite the number of challenges it has faced recently.
Marco Streng is a miner, though he does not carry a pick around his base in south-western Iceland. Instead, he keeps tens of thousands of computers running 24 hours a day in fierce competition with others across the globe to earn bitcoins. In the world of the web-based digital currency, it is not central banks that add new money to the system, but rather computers like Streng's which are awarded fresh bitcoins in return for processing blocks of the latest bitcoin transactions.