What is Bitcoin (BTC)?

Bitcoin or BTC is the world's first cryptocurrency. It launched January 9th 2009 and is still the most popular cryptocurrency in the world. Bitcoin uses a triple entry ledger that lists all the bitcoin transactions that have occurred since bitcoin's inception. This ledger is also public which allows anyone to locate transactions made by any wallet, ever. Each batch of transactions is referred to as a block and since they build on the information of the last block this ever growing set of transactions is called the blockchain. Now, viewing transactions isn't that simple, wallet addresses are made to be private as they are randomly generated alpha numeric strings of text.

For more information on what the blockchain is check out our article here: What is a Blockchain?

Bitcoin is a store of value and it's value changes every second of the day similar to the movement of stocks on the stock market. The value of a bitcoin can be split into Satoshis (named after the creator of bitcoin - Satoshi Nakamoto), with each Satoshi being worth 1⁄100,000,000 of a bitcoin. Therefore the smallest amount of bitcoin that can be held is 0.00000001 BTC.

A bitcoin wallet is used to transact bitcoin - they can be thought of as bank accounts but used to store cryptocurrency not fiat currency.  However, since a wallet's bitcoin is inseparable from the blockchain, what is actually stored on the wallet is the private key, which is the required information initiate transactions from that wallet. 

To learn more about wallets see our article here: What is a Crypto / Bitcoin wallet?

To learn more about bitcoin check out their website here: bitcoin.org or watch the short video linked below!