Bitcoin is a digital currency invented by a mysterious programmer or a group of individuals named Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2008, Satoshi released the digital currencies on a white paper, and in the following year, in 2009, he launched the bitcoin network. At that time, people were completely unaware of digital currencies. With bitcoin, people got to learn about two different terms: bitcoin and blockchain. Bitcoin is open-source software that is decentralized in nature. You can gain knowledge about trading in bitcoin and earning profit by visiting Cryptocurrencies exchange.
Being decentralized in nature means it doesn’t involve any central authorities or government to control or govern it. The whole bitcoin network is controlled by its users or members of the bitcoin community. Bitcoin facilitates peer-to-peer transactions without involving intermediaries. The transactions are completed and verified by a network of several computers. The network of specialized computers is called nodes, and through nodes, the transactions are verified using cryptographic methods. The transactions are recorded in a blockchain that is a shared public ledger.
Here in this article, we will cover different aspects of the bitcoin network, starting from its creation to the mining process and wallets.
Creation of bitcoin
Satoshi Nakamoto registered the domain “bitcoin.org” and linked a paper to it which described bitcoin as an electronic medium. Satoshi posted it to the mailing list of cryptography. Bitcoin is an open-source network, and it’s been more than a decade since the bitcoin was invented, but no one knows the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. A person named Laszlo Hanyecz was the early adopter of bitcoin who did the first transaction by buying two pizzas for $10,000.
The main users of bitcoin were the people of black markets, including Silk Road. Silk Road was the online marketplace that widely accepting bitcoin as a medium of exchange. In the early days of bitcoin, its price was $0.30 per bitcoin, but later, when people came to know about it, its price increased slowly. But the first major change took place in 2017 when the price of bitcoin reached its peak.
Blockchain Technology
The blockchain refers to a distributed public ledger that is like a notebook that records all the bitcoin transactions. The network of computers that runs the bitcoin software does the work of maintaining the blockchain. These nodes validate the bitcoin transactions and add them into a copied ledger. Every 10 minutes, a block of the transaction is created and is further added to the blockchain. The recording of transactions helps to avoid the situation of double-scenario.
Transaction fees
In the Bitcoin network, the transaction fee isn’t charged normally, but the users who want to process their transaction fast by prioritizing them are required to pay the transaction fee. Miners tend to choose the transactions that are paid and serialize them according to the amount of fee that the user has paid. The transaction is measured in sat/b, i.e., satoshis per byte. The fee is generally charged according to the transaction amount.
Mining
Mining is the process of record-keeping that is done through specialized computers using computing power. The miners help in keeping the blockchain complete and reliable. 1MB of transactions makes a block, and a block contains data and information of transactions of users. Each block is connected to the previous blocks, and the blockchain is the complete chain of blocks.
Blocks need to contact the proof-of-work (PoW). A new block is created every 10 minutes, and with each block, the difficulty of computational problems increases.
Wallets
A wallet is more like a bank account that stores the bitcoins and allows bitcoin holders to send and receive bitcoins using a wallet. In technical terms, a wallet is a storage device that stores a bitcoin holder’s virtual credentials that no other person can access. A bitcoin wallet uses cryptographic keys that are public keys and private keys.
It is imperative to protect the private key to secure bitcoins from unauthorized access and save them from malware attacks. Users must secure their wallets using security methods like two-factor authentication and more. The digital wallet provides great convenience to users as they can easily complete the transactions.
