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Concept
Bitcoin
Summary
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC or XBT; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency began use in 2009, when its implementation was released as open-source software.
The word "bitcoin" was defined in a white paper published on October 31, 2008. It is a compound of the words bit and coin.
The Library of Congress reports that, as of November 2021, nine countries have fully banned bitcoin use, and a further forty-two have implicitly banned it. A few governments have used bitcoin in some capacity. El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, although use by merchants remains low. Ukraine has accepted cryptocurrency donations to fund the resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. Iran has used bitcoin to bypass sanctions.
In 2018, Bitcoin has been described as an economic bubble by at least eight recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
The environmental effects of bitcoin are substantial. Its proof-of-work algorithm for bitcoin mining is designed to be computationally difficult, which requires the consumption of increasing quantities of electricity, the generation of which has contributed to climate change. According to the University of Cambridge, bitcoin has emitted an estimated 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide since its launch, or about 0.04% of all carbon dioxide released since 2009.
The unit of account of the bitcoin system is the bitcoin. Currency codes for representing bitcoin are BTC and XBT. Its Unicode character is ₿. One bitcoin is divisible to eight decimal places. Units for smaller amounts of bitcoin are the millibitcoin (mBTC), equal to bitcoin, and the satoshi (sat), which is the smallest possible division, and named in homage to bitcoin's creator, representing (one hundred millionth) bitcoin. 100,000 satoshis are one mBTC.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood
Related people (15)
Related concepts (44)
Digital currency
Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital currencies include cryptocurrency, virtual currency and central bank digital currency. Digital currency may be recorded on a distributed database on the internet, a centralized electronic computer database owned by a company or bank, within or even on a stored-value card.
Trusted timestamping
Trusted timestamping is the process of securely keeping track of the creation and modification time of a document. Security here means that no one—not even the owner of the document—should be able to change it once it has been recorded provided that the timestamper's integrity is never compromised. The administrative aspect involves setting up a publicly available, trusted timestamp management infrastructure to collect, process and renew timestamps. The idea of timestamping information is centuries old.
Merkle tree
In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every "leaf" (node) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every node that is not a leaf (called a branch, inner node, or inode) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. A hash tree allows efficient and secure verification of the contents of a large data structure. A hash tree is a generalization of a hash list and a hash chain.