What is Bitcoin (BTC)?
Bitcoin is an innovative Internet Protocol with or provide anonymous peer-to-peer digital value transactions without the need of a central authority or a bank to execute transactions, which means it is fully decentralized.
Bitcoins has become reality via the collective consensus of the network nodes. Bitcoin is open-source, open to the public, and no one has control over it.
Bitcoin transactions are:
- Permissionless and borderless. You can send payment transactions in BTC to anyone, at anytime, and any amount, with no need of intermediaries like banks or governments. Nobody is able to restrict your remittance, freeze it or control it in any way;
- You do not need to provide any ID or pass KYC/AML, which constitutes technology suitable for the unbanked, the privacy-conscious communities, or people in financially underdeveloped or sanctioned countries;
- Bitcoin cannot be tampered with since nobody is able to block or freeze a transaction of any amount;
- Irreversible once a transaction is added to the blockchain;
- Fast. Transactions can be processed within seconds and become fully irreversible within an hour;
- Available and online 24 hours a day/365 days per year.
These transactions are tracked on a distributed ledger, commonly referred to as a blockchain. This ledger records every bitcoin transaction ever made. Each “block” in the blockchain is built up of a data structure based on encrypted Merkle Trees. This is particularly useful for detecting fraud or corrupt files. Even if a single file is corrupt or fraudulent, the blockchain prevents it from damaging the rest of the ledger.
Stored Bitcoins:
The Bitcoin total supply is stable and predefined at 21 million Bitcoins. More Bitcoins cannot be issued as a result BTC won't be debased. Bitcoin’s blockchain inherent rules guarantee that only 21 million Bitcoins will ever exist. On April 20, 2024, BTC experienced its fourth block reward halving. Today around 450BTC are mined every 24 hours. It will be halved once every four years or so till the last bitcoin has been mined. In actuality, the final bitcoin is hardly to be mined till around the year 2140. Additionally, there are no storage costs as Bitcoins do not take up any physical space regardless of the amount.
How does Bitcoin work?
The underlying technologies behind Bitcoin are public-key cryptography, peer-to-peer networking, and Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism for payment verification. One of Bitcoin’s most appealing features is its verification process, which minimizes the risk of fraud. Bitcoin is decentralized and kept secure by “miners” — continuously verifying transactions and getting block rewards in exchange for their work. Once a specific amount of transactions are verified, another block is added to the blockchain and the process continues as usual.
Each payment transaction is broadcasted to the network and included in the blockchain to avoid double-spending. After a couple of minutes, each transaction is securely stored on the blockchain by the massive amount of processing power that continues to extend the blockchain.
By default the Bitcoin price is provided in USD. But you can easily switch the Bitcoin chart to Euros, British Pounds, Japanese yen, and Russian Roubles using the currency switcher at the top right corner of the CryptoRank.io website.
Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency originally described in a 2008 whitepaper by a person, or group of people, using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. It was launched soon after, in January 2009.Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer online currency, meaning that all transactions happen directly between equal, independent network participants, without the need for any intermediary to permit or facilitate them. Bitcoin was created, according to Nakamoto’s own words, to allow “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”Some concepts for a similar type of a decentralized electronic currency precede BTC, but Bitcoin holds the distinction of being the first-ever cryptocurrency to come into actual use.Bitcoin’s original inventor is known under a pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. As of 2021, the true identity of the person — or organization — that is behind the alias remains unknown.On October 31, 2008, Nakamoto published Bitcoin’s whitepaper, which described in detail how a peer-to-peer, online currency could be implemented. They proposed to use a decentralized ledger of transactions packaged in batches (called “blocks”) and secured by cryptographic algorithms — the whole system would later be dubbed “blockchain.”Just two months later, on January 3, 2009, Nakamoto mined the first block on the Bitcoin network, known as the genesis block, thus launching the world’s first cryptocurrency. Bitcoin price was $0 when first introduced, and most Bitcoins were obtained via mining, which only required moderately powerful devices (e.g. PCs) and mining software. The first known Bitcoin commercial transaction occurred on May 22, 2010, when programmer Laszlo Hanyecz traded 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas. At Bitcoin price today in mid-September 2021, those pizzas would be worth an astonishing $478 million. This event is now known as “Bitcoin Pizza Day.” In July 2010, Bitcoin first started trading, with the Bitcoin price ranging from $0.0008 to $0.08 at that time.However, while Nakamoto was the original inventor of Bitcoin, as well as the author of its very first implementation, he handed the network alert key and control of the code repository to Gavin Andresen, who later became lead developer at the Bitcoin Foundation. Over the years a large number of people have contributed to improving the cryptocurrency’s software by patching vulnerabilities and adding new features.Bitcoin’s source code repository on GitHub lists more than 750 contributors, with some of the key ones being Wladimir J. van der Laan, Marco Falke, Pieter Wuille, Gavin Andresen, Jonas Schnelli and others.