“Has anyone heard about digital immutability before bitcoin? Introducing the trustless concept, any information added to the bitcoin’s blockchain stays there forever, so goodbye financial fraud. Any new block added carries information from the previous block, so to change a new block, we would have to change all the others behind….”
Statistics
Coin Name: Bitcoin
Token: BTC
Birth of project: 2009
Project Status: Complete
Circulating Supply: 16,876,187 BTC
Validation: Proof-of-Work
Official Links
Official website: https://bitcoin.org/en/
Official Wallet: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/
Explorer: https://blockchain.info/
Other: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper/
Introduction to Bitcoin (BTC)
Back in January 2009, Bitcoin was pure abstraction in terms of value, or if we want to put it in another terms, it had zero value. We could buy nothing with it, and the value that it was given to it by the early adopters was totally subjective.
Quickly people realized that Bitcoin was something more than an experiment, as the blockchain proved to be a reliable facilitator of money transfer over the internet. E-commerce and other businesses started to gain interest, and when other use cases kept on appearing, also did the speculation on the value of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto presented Bitcoin with an issuance model that rewarded each miner with 50 Bitcoin. It was almost nothing 10 years ago, and some of us might have heard about it and neglected it, but now it is worth a fortune.
The job of the miner is called proof-of-work, and in its first year of existence – every hour – 300 bitcoins were produced, summing up 2.6 million at the end of the year. Satoshi also programmed Bitcoin with block rewarding halving, which means that after 210.000 blocks mined (number achieved after 4 years), the bitcoins mined per hour dropped to half.
This scarcity created a notion of bigger value for bitcoin, and on November 2012 the 50 bitcoin reward was cut down to, and on July 2016 dropped to 12.5.
Apart from these technical aspects, bitcoin kept presenting itself as the very first decentralized currency with real adoption, but given the magnitude of the innovation, there were, and still are, issues. One of these is the 10 minutes a bitcoin block took to appear in the blockchain, what meant a merchant had to wait that time before knowing if he was paid or not for the service or property he wanted to sell.
These can be considered minor and temporary details given what bitcoin offers. Has anyone heard about digital immutability before bitcoin? Introducing the trustless concept, any information added to the bitcoin’s blockchain stays there forever, so goodbye financial fraud. Any new block added carries information from the previous block, so to change a new block, we would have to change all the others behind.
Let’s talk about price. We have seen it worth nothing, rising to 20k, dropping to 7k, up it goes again now, but does the price really matter? The reality is that the developers just keep on working and improving the protocol and everything built on it, not matter what the price is.
One major concern about bitcoin is scalability. Bitcoin is slow transacting, but – again – solutions are being developed, namely off-chain transactions. This is a necessity to keep this blockchain layer lighter, and the lightning network and the creation of payment channels are the way to solve this problem.
Of course, that this is no easy task, and it will take time to solve this question, but waiting for proper development is certainly something worth doing. More, Bitcoin has already left a legacy with its open source code, which allowed several developers to create similar software under the name of the numerous Altcoins.
This is a brief introduction to Bitcoin, but if you want to know more about the coin, what people are saying about it, technical details, jump right in any of the links we present below. They are well worth reading before investing!
Price:
Price History
Feb 19, 2018: $10,552.60
Jan 19, 2018: $11,429.80
Dec 19, 2017: $19,118.30
Nov 19, 2017: $7,766.03
Supporting Links
- Bitcoin Declared Dead 140+ Times and Counting
- The Most Mind-Blowing Feature of Cryptocurrency
- Satoshi Nakamoto Institute
- The Reason Behind Resistance To SegWit
- Bitcoin Civil War
- Segwit vs Bitcoin Unlimited Debate Escalates
- A simple explanation for Bitcoin’s revolutionary technology
- Gold or Garbage: Is Bitcoin Worthless?
Bitcoin History (old news)
13 Comments
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I love your brief introduction to bitcoin,it’s easy to understand especially for a newbie who finds it hard to take in the technicalities involved in bitcoin. The price of bitcoin at the moment is unstable, however I personally think bitcoin is a good investment in the long-run because, of the usability of trading with it. Anyone who can use a computer can buy and exchange bitcoins. The fact that there is only a limited amount of bitcoin that can ever be released will see this cryptocurrency rise in value, especially in future.
You are absolutely correct, the worth of bitcoin is definitely going to be on the increase even from now till future time. Those that are reaping the benefits of bitcoin are the ones that took the opportunity and invested in the cryptocurrency when it came out newly. Although there were sometimes the price of bitcoin took a down turn but it rose up immediately.
Your brief introduction to Bitcoin is good, I might bookmark this page as a place for new users to start. Watching bitcoin grow as an innovative payment network, operating independently of central banks has been really interesting for me.
Holding Bitcoin right now could prove to be an investment for the future, when the demand becomes higher, which will result in a more valuable bitcoin since the supply is limited.
Of course yes, bitcoin is a revelation of how good the world is going to turn out once every corner in the world accepts the use of bitcoin for settling all forms of transactions. It’s definitely going to make things a lot more better for people with its swift payments and no delay.
Also known that there is a specific number of bitcoin to be released would definitely make its value increase once the demand increases and supply reduce. So hold your if you have it because the day of cashing in is coming closer.
Yeah, that is a fact. We can never forget where BTC came from, a fraction of a dollar. I deeply regret not buying BTC in January 2017 when it was around $900. Sure, it has crashed from 20k, but like in life, nothing is a straight line.
I made the mistake of not buying Bitcoin in 2009 when it was introduced to the world because I was skeptical about the program and what it offers, I never believed it would come to the height it was today but I refused to make the same mistake when its value splashed in early 2018, I was able to make a joint purchase into the Cryptocurrency.
I heard about bitcoins back in 2014. I acquired my first bitcoins when a writing site called blogjob paid me $100 worth bitcons for contributing to the site. Bitcons was priced $400 when I g0t my first coins. That was in the middle of 2015. By the end of 2015, I had one bitcoins. However, I did not understand the true value of bitcoins. I converted to USD and spent my bitcoins.
If the site is still active, I believe that you can still try and make more contributions to the site to receive more bitcoin if it’s still possible. But I doubt if they will still offer such deals now that the worth of bitcoin has risen beyond anyone’s imagination. Maybe they will still offer such benefits to new members joining the site. Do you think I should check out the site?
That is a sad story @Vinaya! I suppose you are now sorry you sold them right? 🙂
If I was able to get such information on bitcoin back in 2011 someone’s introduced me to the cryptocurrency, I would would have actually had the confidence and courage to invest in the coin, this is why I believe in that quote – knowledge is power and if you are not informed, you are deformed.
Yeah, it’s pretty much a matter of trust because for the newbie is sending our hard earned money into something abstract. Cashing out the profits is not so abstract though.
History loves to repeat itself 🙂
Next year there may very well be a bunch of people wishing they had bought bitcoin this year! We still don’t know, bitcoin valued at $8500 could still be a very cheap compared to the future.
When Bitcoin went to 20k, people would have loved to have gotten in at $8,500. Now may be that chance.
Very useful one!…. The contributor of Forbes- Peter Tchir specified in his article “According to the FT and Bloomberg, the Justice Department has declared a criminal probe into whether traders/investors are manipulating the price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies.”
This is what current situation is undergoing.
Whether the activities satisfy the legal definition of manipulation or can drive to a criminal indictment remains to be seen. So let’s see what happens next.