Bitcoin is currently used more as a store of value and less as a medium of exchange or unit of account. 1 In 2021, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation. īased on a free market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown person. Bitcoin mining requires increasing quantities of electricity and was responsible for 0.2% of world greenhouse gas emissions as of 2022. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger, called a blockchain, without central oversight.Ĭonsensus between nodes is achieved using a computationally intensive system based on proof-of-work called mining. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.īitcoin ( abbreviation: BTC or XBT sign: ₿) is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. This article contains special characters.

Initially ₿50 per block, halved every 210,000 blocks 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System'Ġ.1.0 / 9 January 2009 (14 years ago) ( )Ģ5.1 / 19 October 2023 (2 months ago) ( )

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