Two types of bitcoin exchanges are in use: peer‐to‐peer and what we’ll call regular. On the one hand, there are the regular bitcoin exchanges, which use an order book to match buy and sell orders between people. However, neither the buyer nor the seller has any idea who the other party is, and this provides all users with a certain level of anonymity and privacy protection. This is the most commonly used form of exchanging local currency to and from its digital counterpart in the form of bitcoin. However, bitcoin was originally created to enable peer‐to‐peer transactions. Unlike other familiar peer‐to‐peer technologies you may be familiar with, such as torrent applications, in the bitcoin domain peer‐to‐peer means a one‐on‐one relationship. A peer-to-peer transaction means that you have data related to the person or entity you’re interacting with at all times, rather than interacting with several different peers, as in the case of torrents.