Bitcoin
Symbol – XBT, BTC
What is Bitcoin ?
Bitcoin is the oldest and most popular cryptocurrency, which enables a decentralised payment-system for goods and services.
Bitcoin Definition
BTC uses the blockchain-technology to enable a decentralised payment-system without the need of banks or other financial-institutions. For every Bitcoin-transaction, encrypted hash-codes get digitally exchanged across the peer-to-peer network of the bitcoin-community. The blockchain, which is a continuously growing list of transaction-records (blocks), monitors and verifies the transfer of Bitcoins between users. The compute-intensive progress of processing all the transaction-data (blocks) is made by miners all over the world. The miners get a little amount of bitcoins for processing the transactions. So there is no need to trust in financial institutions like banks. The bitcoin-community and its decentralised system controls the money by itself.
Each user’s Bitcoins are stored in a program called digital wallet, which also holds each network-address the user sends and receives Bitcoins from, as well as a private key known only to the user and required as key for secure money-transfer.
History – Bitcoin Info
Founded: 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto (unknown person or group)
– January 2009: Blockchain users generated the first bitcoins – Genesis Block (block 0)
– May 22, 2010: first real-world transaction: a pizza for 10.000 BTC
– Early 2011: dark net (silk road) users prefer bitcoin to buy and sell items
– February 2011: BTC reaching parity with the U.S. Dollar
– October 2013: FBI shutdown of The Silk Road
– Early 2014: Hackers stole 850.000 BTC from the largest Bitcoin exchange (Mt Gox)
– 2016: mining rewards halving from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC
– August 2017: BTC splits into two versions: Bitcoin (SegWit) and Bitcoin Cash (bigger blocks)
– September 2017: BTC reaches historical $5.000
Further Information
Trading Platform
Wallet
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