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.
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This course provides an introduction to distributed ledger technology, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, and their potential applications in finance and banking.
A decentralized system is one that works when no single party is in charge or fully trusted. This course teaches decentralized systems principles while guiding students through the development and tes
Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit E-mail spam and denial-of-service attacks. Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back and described more formally in Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure". The idea "...to require a user to compute a moderately hard, but not intractable function..." was proposed by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in their 1992 paper "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail".
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.
A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the reduction of need for trusted intermediators, arbitration costs, and fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Smart contracts are commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, and the smart contracts introduced by Ethereum are generally considered a fundamental building block for decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFT applications.
Many interesting applications emerged with the increasing popularity of deep learning. This project explored natural language processing and visualization techniques as well as two neural network arch
This thesis is structured in three chapters, each pertaining to a specific problem in financial economics. The first chapter, titled 'High-Frequency Jump Analysis of the Bitcoin Market' and co-authore
We use the database leak of Mt. Gox exchange to analyze the dynamics of the price of bitcoin from June 2011 to November 2013. This gives us a rare opportunity to study an emerging retail-focused, high