How can you acquire it?

Bitcoin can be acquired by any home pc,laptop or high end gaming pc. The process of this is called "Mining". Mining, or generating, is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions.

This ledger of past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks. The block chain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place. Bitcoin nodes use the block chain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to respend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.

Mining is intentionally designed to be resource-intensive and difficult so that the number of blocks found each day by miners remains steady. Individual blocks must contain a proof of work to be considered valid. This proof of work is verified by other Bitcoin nodes each time they receive a block.

One very import aspect is the controlled rate at which block hashes are generated, which is called mining. By design this is, on average, every 10 minutes. However, because computing power in the peer-to-peer network can fluctuate as new nodes enter/leave the network and/or computational power of those nodes increase due to hardware improvements, the difficulty of the validation hash has to adjust accordingly.

To accomplish this, the bitcoin network adjusts the requirements for a “suitable” block validation hash. As we stated above, a block validation hash must have a specific number of leading zero bits, so in order to adjust the time on average it takes to generate a valid value, the number of leading zeros required adjusts accordingly. As more computing power is added to the processing network, the number of leading zeroes increases (making it more difficult to find a value). Alternately, if the computing power decreases, the number of leading zeroes required decreases as well (making it easier to find a value).

Quite simply, the more nodes (or more specifically, the number crunching available) in the system, the harder a hash is to generate. Considering the SHA-256 hashes are generated via brute force, the mining process consumes an enormous amount of processing power. Additionally, there is no guarantee that any particular mining node will ever generate a suitable hash (and, hence, collect the newly generated bitcoins and/or transaction fees) as it is simply “luck” that a particular node finds a suitable value first.