Bitcoin definition
Bitcoin BTC is the first digital currency in the world, the largest digital currency in terms of total market capitalization, and the most expensive. It is a decentralized (encrypted) digital currency that runs on blockchain technology.
Bitcoin BTC |
Bitcoin origins
Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous person, published a Bitcoin research paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" on October 31, 2008, in which he explains how Bitcoin works, how to protect it from piracy, and the types of transactions that can be conducted through it, and the currency was launched on January 3, 2009, according to the mechanism described in this research paper.
Bitcoin has existed for several years without acquiring any significant value, and its use was limited to digital collectors and technology enthusiasts, before gradually gaining great value and reaching record values in the tens of thousands of dollars per Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the world's first digital money, and it also has the highest market share in the cryptocurrency market, as well as being the most expensive when compared to other currencies.
How does bitcoin work?
Bitcoin, like most digital currencies, is based on blockchain technology, which was designed and described in several research papers prior to the launch of Bitcoin. The basic principle of this technology is to store transaction data and currency balances on all network members' devices, rather than on central servers, as is the case with bank balances, for example.
This technology to prevent double-spending and transaction fraud is based on mining, which is the process by which devices spend a lot of computing power - difficult for potential attackers to match - to authenticate and create new blocks, in exchange for which a number of new coins are "minted" with each new block.
Bitcoin relies on "Proof of Effort," a system that compels people who authenticate and produce new blocks to show the amount of computing power - or work - spent on creating the block token known as "hash" in order to assure its security. As a result, the legitimacy of this block is guaranteed, as is its direct link to the preceding block, which provides the new block's hash in order to keep the blocks in the chain-linked.
Bitcoin forks
As with other large digital currencies, Bitcoin has seen a number of forks from its primary network, which have resulted in the formation of other currencies derived from it. The most notable of these forks today are:
- Bitcoin Vault (BTCV)
- Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)
It is a Bitcoin clone that was launched in 2019 on the Ethereum network (ERC-20), allowing it to be traded on the Ethereum blockchain, which hosts many decentralized finance (Defi) currencies, and its price is set at 1:1 for Bitcoin, so its price changes in response to bitcoin's movement rather than supply and demand for bitcoin.
- Bitcoin Cash and its symbol (BCH)
The major goal of its creation, which began in 2017, was to avoid some of the Bitcoin network's drawbacks, such as slow transaction execution times and expensive fees, by increasing the maximum size of a single block to 8 MB, and then to 32 MB in October 2021.
Bitcoin adoption
Today, Bitcoin has become an important part of the global financial system; its total market value is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and it has also become a part of the investment portfolios of many companies and investment funds, in addition to launching several investment funds based on bitcoin or related commercial and technological activities, the most well-known of which is the Exchange Traded Fund "Proshares Bitcoin Strategy" (Nasdaq: BITO), whose total market value is in the hundreds of billion