Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the pioneer of the cryptocurrency concept, as it’s the first decentralized digital currency introduced back in 2009. The creator of BTC and underlying blockchain technology is mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, whose true identity hasn’t been discovered yet, despite quite a lot of people claimed they had created Bitcoin. BTC opened up the new industry of peer-to-peer crypto coins, which has been actively evolving since then.

Bitcoin is built on the distributed ledger technology or blockchain. In other words, each Bitcoin transaction that has ever been made exists on a public ledger accessible to everyone, making transactions hard to reverse and difficult to fake. Managing these transactions and the issuing of Bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network. This is possible due to peer-to-peer (P2P) technology that eliminates the need for a central authority or any intermediaries, like banks.

Bitcoins are elementally made through the process of mining, which is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems. In fact, there are only 21 million Bitcoins that can be mined in total. Once miners have unlocked this number of bitcoins, the supply will be exhausted.

The list of BTC use cases is unlimited. It can be used for payment transactions, as a store of value, as collateral, and much more. Bitcoin has a huge lead over the hundreds of other digital currencies, it is revolutionizing and challenging the traditional finance systems.