Ukraine has accepted cryptocurrency donations to fund the resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, although use by merchants remains low. A few governments have used bitcoin in some capacity. The Library of Congress reports that, as of November 2021, nine countries have fully banned bitcoin use, while a further forty-two have implicitly banned it. It is a compound of the words bit and coin. The word ' bitcoin' was defined in a white paper published on October 31, 2008. The currency began use in 2009, when its implementation was released as open-source software. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. īitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Because the token has characteristics of money, it can be thought of as a digital currency.

The user can update the ledger, assigning some of their bitcoin to another entry in the ledger. The protocol specifies that the entry indicates an amount of a token, bitcoin with a minuscule b. In order to add to the ledger, a user must prove they control an entry in the ledger. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.īitcoin ( abbreviation: BTC or XBT sign: ₿) is a protocol which implements a highly available, public, permanent, and decentralized ledger. This article contains special characters. Initially ₿50 per block, halved every 210,000 blocks

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