bitcoin

information

Rank No 1

market cap $ 1.31T

fully diluted market cap 1.39T

market dominance 54.14%

circulation supply 19.7M Btc

max supply 21M Btc

issue date 2008-11-01

all time high 2024-03-14 $73750

all time 2010-07-15 $0.0486454

Bitcoin (BTC) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that aims to function as a means of exchange that is independent of any central authority. BTC can be transferred electronically in a secure, verifiable, and immutable way.

Launched in 2009, BTC is the first virtual currency to solve the double-spending issue by timestamping transactions before broadcasting them to all of the nodes in the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin Protocol offered a solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem with a blockchain network structure, a notion first created by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1991.

Bitcoin’s whitepaper was published pseudonymously in 2008 by an individual, or a group, with the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto”, whose underlying identity has still not been verified.

The Bitcoin protocol uses an SHA-256d-based Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm to reach network consensus. Its network has a target block time of 10 minutes and a maximum supply of 21 million tokens, with a decaying token emission rate. To prevent fluctuation of the block time, the network's block difficulty is re-adjusted through an algorithm based on the past 2016 block times.

With a block size limit capped at 1 megabyte, the Bitcoin Protocol has supported both the Lightning Network, a second-layer infrastructure for payment channels, and Segregated Witness, a soft-fork to increase the number of transactions on a block, as solutions to network scalability.