Hi. I've heard of bitcoin, and have recently become intrigued by the whole blockchain phenomena. I'm curious, as to what in the heck bitcoin/crypto-currencies are. Also, how would one get involved with bitcoin? Do you need a credit card to buy bitcoin?
It's basically a computer looking at an encrypted block of numbers, eventually saying "numberwang", reporting to other computers who agree and then that new numberwang result (a bitcoin) gets added to the entire bitcoin pool. People then agree that bitcoin is worth money.
There are bitcoin ATMs but you can get bitcoin from people with any currency they'll accept.
You can mine bitcoin but you're almost too late to get into it now. Bitcoin becomes harder to mine and more scarce as time passes. Used to be that you could get a couple of video cards (because the CPU on a graphics card - a GPU - is faster at it), mine a few and call it a day. Now you almost need a bitcoin mining rig to get anything out of it.