What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin was the first decentralized digital currency based on blockchain technology. It was created in 2008 by an anonymous programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto, who released the white paper in a cryptography mailing list and later open sourced the software that implements the protocol.
How does Bitcoin work & where can I get a bitcoin wallet?
Bitcoin software runs on a number of distributed devices ranging from smartphones as mobile wallets, PCs as desktop wallets, to ASICs for mining. Transactions are relayed between nodes in a peer-to-peer fashion. In a few seconds a given block will be propagated to all other nodes on the network. While insuring that all nodes reach consensus on which are the valid blocks. The process of supplying new bitcoin to the system is done via the process of mining. The mining software runs on specialized hardware and it tries to compute the hash of assembled transactions and a number called the nonce. The software targets a difficulty index automatically adjusted by the network. The first miner to find the correct nonce wins the mining reward and can relay the mined block to other peers on the network.
What are the features of Bitcoin?
Store of Value
Bitcoin, unlike other cryptocurrencies is considered as a store of value and could arguably become the next global reserve currency.
Gateway to the Digital Currency World
Bitcoin is considered as the gateway to the cryptocurrency world, based on its status as the first successful digital currency experiment.
Bitcoin Script Language
An assembly like language used to build complex types of transactions and advanced contracts to an extent. Complex transactions like Multi-Sig are possible because of advanced Bitcoin scripting.
Some Key Terms
Soft Fork
Change to the Bitcoin protocol that makes old blocks invalid which were valid in the past. Bitcoin Segwit transactions feature was implemented as a soft fork to the network.
Hard Fork
Change to the Bitcoin protocol that makes previously invalid blocks or transactions valid. The BerkeleyDB bug activated an accidental hard fork to the Bitcoin network in 2013.