What is Bitcoin?

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Bitcoin was invented by an unknown person or group of people under the name Satoshi Nakamoto [11] and released as open-source software in Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining.

They can be exchanged for other currencies, [13] products, and services. As of Februaryovermerchants and vendors accepted bitcoin as payment. The word bitcoin first occurred and was defined in the white paper [5] that was published on 31 October There is no uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization. Some sources use Bitcoincapitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoinlowercase, to refer to the unit of account.

The unit of account of the bitcoin system is a bitcoin. Named in homage to bitcoin's creator, a satoshi is the smallest amount within bitcoin representing 0. As with most new symbols, font support is very limited. Typefaces supporting it include Horta. On 18 August147 million bitcoin wikipedia domain name "bitcoin. In Januarythe bitcoin network came into existence after Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first ever block on the chain, known as the genesis block.

This note has been interpreted as both a timestamp of the genesis 147 million bitcoin wikipedia and a derisive comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.

The receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was cypherpunk Hal Finneywho created the first reusable proof-of-work system RPOW in In the early days, Nakamoto is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins. So, if I get hit by a bus, it would be clear that the project would go on.

Over the history of Bitcoin there have been several spins offs and deliberate hard forks that have lived on as separate blockchains. These have come to be known as "altcoins", short for alternative coins, since Bitcoin was the first blockchain and these are derivative of it. These spin offs occur so that new ideas can be tested, when the scope of that idea is outside that of Bitcoin, 147 million bitcoin wikipedia when the community is split about merging such changes.

Since then there have been numerous forks of Bitcoin. See list of bitcoin forks. The blockchain is a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: The blockchain is a distributed database — to achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin amount, each network node stores its own copy of the blockchain.

This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the blockchain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.

Transactions are defined using a Forth -like scripting language. When a user sends bitcoins, the user designates 147 million bitcoin wikipedia address and the amount of bitcoin being sent to that address in an output. To prevent double spending, each input must refer to a previous unspent output in the blockchain.

Since transactions can have multiple outputs, users can send bitcoins to multiple recipients in one transaction. As in a cash transaction, the sum of inputs coins used to pay can exceed the intended sum of payments. In such a case, an additional output is used, returning the change back to the payer.

Paying a transaction fee is optional. Because the size of mined blocks is capped by the network, miners choose transactions based on the fee paid relative to their storage size, not the absolute amount of money paid as a fee. The size of 147 million bitcoin wikipedia is dependent on the number of inputs used to create the transaction, and the number of outputs.

In the blockchain, bitcoins are registered to bitcoin addresses. Creating a bitcoin address is 147 million bitcoin wikipedia more than picking a random valid private key and computing the corresponding bitcoin address.

This computation can be done in a split second. But the reverse computing the private key of a given bitcoin address is mathematically unfeasible and so users can tell others and make public a bitcoin address without compromising its corresponding private key.

Moreover, the number of valid private keys is so vast that it is extremely unlikely someone will compute a key-pair that is already in use and has funds. The vast number of valid private keys makes it unfeasible that brute force could be used for that. To be able to spend the bitcoins, the owner must know the corresponding private key and digitally sign the transaction. The network verifies the signature using the public key. If the private key is lost, the bitcoin network will not recognize any other evidence 147 million bitcoin wikipedia ownership; [9] the coins are then unusable, and effectively lost.

Mining is a record-keeping service done through the use of computer processing power. To be accepted by the 147 million bitcoin wikipedia of the network, a new block must contain a so-called proof-of-work PoW. Every 2, blocks approximately 14 days at roughly 10 min per blockthe difficulty target is adjusted based on the network's recent performance, with the aim of keeping the average time between new blocks at ten minutes.

In this way the system automatically adapts to the total amount of mining power on the network. The proof-of-work system, 147 million bitcoin wikipedia the chaining of blocks, makes modifications of the blockchain extremely hard, as an attacker must modify all subsequent blocks in order for the modifications of one block to be accepted.

Computing power is often bundled together or "pooled" to reduce variance in miner income. Individual mining rigs often have to wait for long periods to confirm a block of transactions and receive payment.

In a pool, all participating miners get paid every time a participating server solves a block. This payment depends on the amount of work an individual miner contributed to help 147 million bitcoin wikipedia that block. The successful miner finding the new block is rewarded with newly created bitcoins and transaction fees. To claim the reward, a special transaction called a coinbase is included with the processed payments.

147 million bitcoin wikipedia bitcoin protocol specifies that the reward for adding a block will be halved every 147 million bitcoin wikipedia, blocks approximately every four years.

Eventually, the reward will decrease to zero, and the limit of 21 147 million bitcoin wikipedia bitcoins [f] will be reached c. Their numbers are being released roughly every ten minutes and the rate at which they 147 million bitcoin wikipedia generated would drop by half every four years until all were in circulation. A wallet stores the information necessary to transact bitcoins. While wallets are often described as a place to hold [60] or store bitcoins, [61] due to the nature of the system, bitcoins are inseparable from the blockchain transaction ledger.

A better way to describe a wallet is something that "stores the digital credentials for your bitcoin holdings" [61] and allows one to access and spend them. Bitcoin uses 147 million bitcoin wikipedia cryptographyin which two cryptographic keys, one public and one private, are generated.

There are three modes which wallets can operate in. They have an inverse relationship with regards to trustlessness and computational requirements. Third-party internet services called online wallets offer similar functionality but may be easier to use. In this case, credentials to access funds are stored with the online wallet provider rather than on the user's hardware. A malicious provider or a breach in server security may cause entrusted bitcoins to be stolen.

An example of such a security breach occurred with Mt. Physical wallets store offline the credentials necessary to spend bitcoins. Another type of wallet called a hardware wallet keeps credentials offline while facilitating transactions. The first wallet program — simply named "Bitcoin" — was released in by Satoshi Nakamoto as open-source code.

While a decentralized system cannot have an "official" implementation, Bitcoin Core is considered by some to be bitcoin's preferred implementation. Bitcoin was designed not to need a central authority [5] and the bitcoin network is considered to be decentralized. In mining pool Ghash. The pool has voluntarily capped their hashing power at Bitcoin is pseudonymousmeaning that funds are not tied to real-world entities but rather bitcoin 147 million bitcoin wikipedia. Owners of bitcoin addresses are not explicitly identified, but all transactions on the blockchain are public.

In addition, transactions can be linked to individuals and companies through "idioms of use" e. To heighten financial privacy, a new bitcoin address can be generated for 147 million bitcoin wikipedia transaction. Wallets and similar software technically handle all bitcoins as equivalent, establishing the basic level of fungibility.

Researchers have pointed out that the history of each bitcoin is registered and publicly available in the blockchain ledger, and that some users may refuse to accept bitcoins coming from controversial transactions, which would harm bitcoin's fungibility.

The blocks in the blockchain were originally limited to 32 megabyte 147 million bitcoin wikipedia size. The block size limit of one megabyte 147 million bitcoin wikipedia introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto inas an anti-spam measure. Transaction records traditionally contain a certain amount of data that is mostly only used while confirming the block in question; it does 147 million bitcoin wikipedia serve any real purpose once the block is safely on the chain.

SegWit introduces a new transaction format that segregates these record fields from record fields of lasting value such as ID, sender, recipient, or amount.

147 million bitcoin wikipedia segregated data, the so-called witnessis not sent to non-SegWit nodes and therefore does not form part of the blockchain as seen by the existing ecosystem. This lowers the size of the average transaction, thereby increasing the effective carrying capacity of each block without incurring the hark 147 million bitcoin wikipedia implied by a conventional block size increase.

Bitcoin is a digital asset designed by its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, to work as a currency. The question whether bitcoin is a currency or not is still disputed.

According 147 million bitcoin wikipedia research produced by Cambridge Universitythere were between 2. The number of users has grown significantly sincewhen there wereto 1.

Inthe number of merchants accepting bitcoin exceededReasons for this fall include high transaction fees due to bitcoin's scalability issues, long transaction times and a rise in value making consumers unwilling to spend it. Merchants accepting bitcoin ordinarily use the services of bitcoin payment service providers such as BitPay or Coinbase. When a customer pays in bitcoin, the payment service provider accepts the bitcoin on behalf of the merchant, converts it to the local currency, and sends the obtained amount to merchant's bank account, charging a fee for the service.

Bitcoins can be 147 million bitcoin wikipedia on digital currency exchanges. According to Tony Gallippia co-founder of BitPay"banks are scared to deal with bitcoin companies, even if they really want to".

In a report, Bank of America Merrill Lynch stated that "we believe bitcoin can become a major means of payment for e-commerce and may emerge as a serious competitor to traditional money-transfer providers.

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Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown person or people who developed bitcoin , authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation.

They were active in the development of bitcoin up until December In October , Nakamoto published a paper [6] [7] on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd. It was titled "Bitcoin: In January , Nakamoto released the first bitcoin software that launched the network and the first units of the bitcoin cryptocurrency , called bitcoins. Nakamoto claimed that work on the writing of the code began in The implemented solution enabled specialized codes and data fields from the start through the use of a predicative script.

Nakamoto created a website with the domain name bitcoin. Around this time, he handed over control of the source code repository and network alert key to Gavin Andresen , [13] transferred several related domains to various prominent members of the bitcoin community, and stopped his involvement in the project.

Until shortly before his absence and handover, Nakamoto made all modifications to the source code himself. On 3 January , the bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of bitcoin block number 0 , which had a reward of 50 bitcoins.

The text refers to a headline in The Times published on 3 January This block is unlike all other blocks in that it doesn't have a previous block to reference. Timestamps for subsequent blocks indicate that Nakamoto did not try to mine all the early blocks solely for himself.

As initially the sole and subsequently the predominant miner, Nakamoto was awarded bitcoin at genesis and for 10 days afterwards. Nakamoto has not disclosed any personal information when discussing technical matters. On his P2P Foundation profile as of , Nakamoto claimed to be a year-old male who lived in Japan , [25] but some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his use of perfect English and his bitcoin software not being documented or labelled in Japanese.

Occasional British English spelling and terminology such as the phrase "bloody hard" in both source code comments and forum postings led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one individual in the consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin. Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's bitcoin forum posts more than ; the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.

This was between 2 p. Japanese time , suggesting an unusual sleep pattern for someone presumably living in Japan. As this pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was asleep at this time. This is an earlier draft than the final draft on bitcoin.

Gavin Andresen has said of Nakamoto's code: There is still doubt about the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. In December , a blogger named Skye Grey linked Nick Szabo to the bitcoin whitepaper using a stylometric analysis.

Detailed research by financial author Dominic Frisby provides much circumstantial evidence but, as he admits, no proof that Satoshi is Szabo. In a July email to Frisby, he said: I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it'. Besides his name, Goodman pointed to a number of facts that circumstantially suggested he was the bitcoin inventor. Nakamoto was laid off twice in the early s and turned libertarian , according to his daughter, and encouraged her to start her own business "not under the government's thumb.

It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection. Hal Finney 4 May — 28 August was a pre-bitcoin cryptographic pioneer and the first person other than Nakamoto himself to use the software, file bug reports, and make improvements. However, after meeting Finney, seeing the emails between him and Nakamoto and his bitcoin wallet's history including the very first bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto to him, which he forgot to pay back and hearing his denial, Greenberg concluded that Finney was telling the truth.

On 8 December , Wired wrote that Craig Steven Wright , an Australian academic, "either invented bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did". The same day, Gizmodo published a story with evidence obtained by a hacker who supposedly broke into Wright's email accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a joint pseudonym for Craig Steven Wright and computer forensics analyst David Kleiman , who died in His business premises in Ryde, New South Wales were also searched by police.

The Australian Federal Police stated they conducted searches to assist the Australian Taxation Office and that "This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin. In articles released on the same day, journalists from the BBC and The Economist stated that they saw Wright signing a message using the private key associated with the first bitcoin transaction.

Some people will believe, some people won't, and to tell you the truth, I don't really care. I didn't decide [to reveal my identity now]. People decided this matter for me.

And they're making life difficult not for me but my friends, my family, my staff. They want to be private. They don't want all of this to affect them. And I don't want any of them to be impacted by this.

None of it's true. There are lots of stories out there that have been made up. And I don't like it hurting those people I care about. So I am going to do this thing only once. I am going to come in front of a camera once. And I will never, ever, be on the camera ever again for any TV station, or any media, ever. Wright's claim was supported by Jon Matonis former director of the Bitcoin Foundation and bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen , both of whom met Wright and witnessed a similar signing demonstration.

However, bitcoin developer Peter Todd said that Wright's blog post, which appeared to contain cryptographic proof, actually contained nothing of the sort. On 4 May , Wright made another post on his blog intimating his intentions to publish "a series of pieces that will lay the foundations for this extraordinary claim". I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me.

But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage.

On Thursday 5 May shortly before closing his blog, Wright sent around an email link to a news story from an impostor site resembling SiliconAngle saying "Craig Wright faces criminal charges and serious jail time in UK". Wright stated that "I am the source of terrorist funds as bitcoin creator or I am a fraud to the world.

At least a fraud is able to see his family. There is nothing I can do. Three True Stories" in which O'Hagan spends several weeks with Wright at the request of Wright's public relations team; which, as revealed in the book, was set up as a result of a business deal between Wright and various individuals including Calvin Ayre after bitcoin was created.

All of those involved in the described business deal seemed to agree that they wanted a significant event in human history to be documented by a writer with complete impartiality and freedom to investigate. O'Hagan was with Wright during the time of his various media interviews. O'Hagan also interviews Wright's wife, colleagues and many of the other people involved in his claims.

Further, O'Hagan suggests that Wright provided an invalid private key because he was legally unable to provide the valid one as a result of legal obligations agreed as part of a Seychelles trust deal previously reached. O'Hagan's book also corroborates the suggestion that both Wright and David Kleiman were the identies of the moniker "Satoshi Nakamoto".

He had told the BBC that he had not wanted to come out into the spotlight but needed to dispel damaging rumours affecting his family, friends and colleagues.

But O'Hagan shows us something rather different - a man under intense pressure from business associates who stood to profit from him if he could be shown to be Nakamoto. This is in reference to O'Hagan's firsthand account, which describes business associates as being furious when they learned that Wright had provided invalid proof despite showing them valid proof privately and for his failure to disclose the details of the Seychelles Trust deal which meant that he could neither provide said proof publicly or yet gain access to the bitcoin attributed to Nakamoto.

Cellan-Jones concludes his article by expressing doubts about Wright but admits "It seems very likely he was involved, perhaps as part of a team that included Dave Kleiman and Hal Finney, the recipient of the first transaction with the currency. Ian Grigg, who is credited with inventing triple entry accounting [84] describes the events as follows [85]:. Firstly, Satoshi Nakamoto is not one human being.

It is or was a team. Craig Wright named one person in his recent communications, being the late Dave Kleinman. Craig did not name others, nor should I. While he was the quintessential genius who had the original idea for Bitcoin and wrote the lion's share of the code, Craig could not have done it alone.

Satoshi Nakamoto was a team effort. New Liberty Dollar issuer Joseph VaughnPerling says he met Wright at a conference in Amsterdam three years before publication of the bitcoin white paper and that Wright introduced himself as Satoshi Nakamoto at that time.

In a article in The New Yorker , Joshua Davis claimed to have narrowed down the identity of Nakamoto to a number of possible individuals, including the Finnish economic sociologist Dr.

Vili Lehdonvirta and Irish student Michael Clear, [88] then a graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College Dublin and now a post-doctoral student at Georgetown University. All three men denied being Nakamoto when contacted by Penenberg. The late Dave Kleiman has been also named as a possible candidate, and Craig Wright claimed an association with him as well. Trammell, a Texas-based security researcher, was suggested as Nakamoto, but he publicly denied it.

The two based their suspicion on an analysis of the network of bitcoin transactions, [99] but later retracted their claim. Some have considered that Nakamoto might be a team of people: Dan Kaminsky , a security researcher who read the bitcoin code, [] said that Nakamoto could either be a "team of people" or a "genius"; [26] Laszlo Hanyecz, a former Bitcoin Core developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well designed for one person.

A article [] published by a former SpaceX intern espoused the possibility of SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk being the real Satoshi, based on Musk's technical expertise with financial software and history of publishing whitepapers. However, in a tweet on November 28th, Musk denied the claim.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 21 August Retrieved 3 November The great chain of being sure about things". Archived from the original on 3 July Retrieved 18 June Archived from the original on 11 August