Crypto Scholar

Bitcoin

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BITCOIN (BTC)

Current Market Price

$ 27,867.00
1.00000000 BTC
Marketcap
$ 538,447,896,378
Volume (24h)
$ 15,115,997,563
Circulating Supply
19,329,431 BTC
Total Supply
21,000,000 BTC

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is the first peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency where all transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.

Bitcoin can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin blockchain without the need for intermediaries. All transactions happen directly between equal, independent network participants. Nakamoto’s vision for Bitcoin was to allow “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

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, those pizzas would be worth an astonishing $620 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.

Bitcoin’s total supply is limited by its software and will never exceed 21,000,000 coins. New coins are created during the process known as “mining”: as transactions are relayed across the network, they get picked up by miners and packaged into blocks, which are in turn protected by complex cryptographic calculations. As compensation for spending their computational resources, the miners receive rewards for every block that they successfully add to the blockchain.



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Bitcoin FAQs

Bitcoin’s original inventor is known by a pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. As of today, the true identity of the person or organization 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 called “blockchain.”

Just two months later, on January 3, 2009, Nakamoto mined the first block on the Bitcoin network, known as the genesis block, launching the world’s first digital cryptocurrency. Bitcoin price was $0 when first introduced, and most Bitcoins were obtained via mining, which only required moderately powerful devices such as your desktop computer and mining software.

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.

Bitcoin has managed to create a global community and give birth to an entirely new industry of millions of enthusiasts who create, invest in, trade and use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in their everyday lives. The emergence of the first cryptocurrency has created a conceptual and technological basis that subsequently inspired the development of thousands of competing projects.

The entire cryptocurrency market is based on the idea realized by Bitcoin: money that can be sent and received by anyone, anywhere in the world without reliance on trusted intermediaries, such as banks and financial services companies.

One of its most important functions of BTC is that it is used as a decentralized store of value. In other words, it provides for ownership rights as a physical asset or as a unit of account. The top crypto is considered a store of value, like gold, for many rather than a currency. This idea of the first cryptocurrency as a store of value, instead of a payment method, means that many people buy the crypto and hold onto it long-term (or HODL) rather than spending it on items like you would typically spend a dollar treating it as digital gold.

Another important feature of bitcoin is the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is an off-chain, layered payment protocol that operates bidirectional payment channels which allows instantaneous transfer with instant reconciliation. It enables private, high volume and trustless transactions between any two parties. The Lightning Network scales transaction capacity without incurring the costs associated with transactions and interventions on the underlying blockchain.

Bitcoin network is secured with the SHA-256 algorithm, which belongs to the SHA-2 family of hashing algorithms, which is also used by its fork Bitcoin Cash (BCH), as well as several other cryptocurrencies.

Network nodes validate transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger and then broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes. To achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership each network node stores its own copy of the blockchain. At varying intervals of time averaging to every 10 minutes, a new group of accepted transactions, called a block, is created, added to the blockchain, and quickly published to all nodes, without requiring central oversight. This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin was spent, which is needed to prevent double-spending.

There are two main ways of upgrading a network: a hard fork and a soft fork. Each one has its benefits and reasons for taking that specific route.

A hard fork is a protocol upgrade that is not backward compatible. This means every node (computer connected to the Bitcoin network using a client that performs the task of validating and relaying transactions) needs to upgrade before the new blockchain with the hard fork activates and rejects any blocks or transactions from the old blockchain. The old blockchain will continue to exist and will continue to accept transactions, although it may be incompatible with other newer Bitcoin clients. Bitcoin’s hard fork resulted in Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash has been hard forked since its original forking, with the creation of Bitcoin SV.

A soft fork is a change to the Bitcoin protocol wherein only previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid. Since old nodes will recognize the new blocks as valid, a soft fork is backward-compatible. This kind of fork requires only a majority of the miners upgrading to enforce the new rules.

Schedule

Once End of Life is reached, bitcoin nodes will need to upgrade to the newest version

 

Version

Release Date

Maintenance End

End of Life

0.18

2019-05-02

2020-06-03

2021-02-01

0.19

2019-11-24

2021-01-15

2021-08-01

0.20

2020-06-03

2021-09-13

2022-02-01

0.21

2021-01-15

after v23.0

TBA

22.0

2021-09-13

after v24.0

TBA

23.0

TBA*

TBA

TBA

 

Major Releases

Bitcoin core developers aim to make a major release every 6-7 months. These will be numbered 0.11.0, 0.12.0 etc. As of today we are currently we are on version 22.0.

Maintenance Releases

We will provide maintenance “minor releases” that fix bugs within the major releases. As a general rule we do not introduce major new features in a maintenance release (except for consensus rules). However, we may add minor features where necessary, and we will back-port consensus rule changes such as soft forks. Minor releases will be numbered 0.11.1, 0.11.2, 0.12.1, 0.12.2 etc. 

Consensus rules

Proposals to change consensus rules are always shipped first in maintenance versions such as 0.11.2, 0.12.1 etc. This makes it easier for enterprise users to assess and test the proposal because of its smaller changes compared to a major release. It also allows users who follow a more conservative upgrade path to adopt consensus rule changes in a timelier manner.

Maintenance period

We maintain the major versions until their “Maintenance End”. We generally maintain the current and previous major release. So if the current release is 0.13, then 0.12 is also considered maintained. Once 0.14 is released, then 0.12 would be considered at its “Maintenance End”. The older the major release, the more critical issues have to be to get backported to it, and the more to warrant a new minor release. Once software has reached the “Maintenance End” period it will only receive critical security fixes until the EOL date. After EOL, users must upgrade to a later version to receive security updates, even though the community may provide fixes for critical issues on a best effort basis. Generally, it is recommended to run the latest maintenance release (point release) of the current or previous major version.

Bitcoin is the most commonly available cryptocurrency on all exchanges. Most trading pairs use BTC as the base pair with other cryptocurrencies, which means that you can buy Bitcoin on virtually every crypto exchange — both for fiat money and other cryptocurrencies.

Some of the top markets where BTC trading is available are:

Binance (Binance.US if in USA)

Coinbase & Coinbase Pro

Gemini

Kraken

Huobi Global

Bitfinex

FTX

Bithumb

Gate.io

Still not sure which exchange to use? Check out Crypto Scholars guide on the top cryptocurrency exchanges and how to register for each one.

The most popular wallets for cryptocurrency include both hot and cold wallets. Cryptocurrency wallets vary from hot wallets and cold wallets. Hot wallets are able to be connected to the web, while cold wallets are used for keeping large amounts of coins outside of the internet.

Some of the top crypto cold wallets are Trezor and Ledger. Some of the top crypto hot wallets include Exodus, Electrum and Mycelium.

Still not sure of which wallet to use? Check out Crypto Scholars guide on the top cold wallets of 2021 and top hot wallets of 2021.

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