Bitcoin (₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network.[7] Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency began use in 2009 when its implementation was released as open-source software.
Check out the most interesting Bitcoin facts that you didn’t know before below
1) Bitcoin was unveiled in October 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto in a nine-page paper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.
2) On January 3, 2009, Bitcoin was first issued (Genesis Block), and on February 11, 2009, the Bitcoin Core v0.1 program was released.
3) Unlike existing currencies, fast and safe transactions between individuals (P2P) are possible without the intervention of the government, central bank, or financial institutions.
4) Bitcoin, like most cryptocurrencies, is highly volatile, so it is meaningless to write about the market price as of several years and months.
5) If you are curious about the current price, just type “bitcoin” into the Google search bar and the current price of 1 bitcoin is displayed.
6) The amount of money to be issued for the next 100 years of bitcoin is predetermined, and only 21 million are issued.
7) Currently, about 18.9 million have been issued (as of January 24, 2022), and 2 million more are expected to be issued in the future.
8) Although the number is insufficient to be used as a world currency, 1 BTC is 8 decimal places, i.e. 10^{-8}10
−8. You can split up to BTC = 0.000000010.00000001BTC.
9) Unlike the recently created blockchain-based coins, they are focused on payment or transaction-related systems, that is, their functions as money. For example, Ethereum has a platform function that can be developed into various applications, and accordingly, many coins such as Basic Attention Token (BAT), Golem (GOLEM), Augur (AUGUR), and Gnosis are created. platform was provided.
10) The biggest feature of Bitcoin is that it works even though the managing body is not set.
11) Bitcoin solved the Byzantine general’s problem with blockchain and proof-of-work. If the number of traitors exceeds 50%, it becomes a problem, but now the network has grown so large that fake currency cannot be produced, so you can use it with confidence.
12) While general currency is printed by the central bank, Bitcoin is guaranteed to issue and pay Bitcoin to anyone who finds a 64-digit hash function that uses a computer to express the block name in hexadecimal without such an issuer.
13) This is called mining, and the time it takes to create a new block is about 10 minutes, and the difficulty level is increased based on the latest mining results of the computer every 10 minutes per block. In other words, the more computers solve the problem, the higher the difficulty of the problem proportionally, the stronger the security of the entire Bitcoin system.
14) The Bitcoin network is designed to generate and distribute a batch of new Bitcoins about 6 times per hour to someone running software that has selected the “generate coin” option, specifically, to someone who has succeeded in creating a block.
15) Creating bitcoins is called “mining” because it is analogous to mining gold. The probability that a user can receive a bundle of coins is equal to the probability of generating a hash below the set target value, and the amount of Bitcoin generated per bundle does not exceed 50 BTC. And the variation is programmed to be reduced by 1/2 every time it becomes the 210,000th block, so that the total does not exceed 21 million. When this payout is reduced, users are encouraged to earn transaction fees rather than running nodes that generate blocks.
16) Contrary to popular belief, graphics cards are rarely used for Bitcoin mining today. More details later. Bitcoin Mining, like the central bank of existing money, is responsible for supplying currency and guaranteeing transactions. However, unlike central banks, mining is conducted in a peer-to-peer manner through the network.
17) Although the principle of the mining process algorithm can be reproduced with paper and pencil, it is said that it was not efficient at all to manually perform the mining process itself.
18) When the mining problem is solved, the amount of bitcoins that come out is halved about every four years, and the total amount is set to converge to about 21 million bitcoins.
19) As of January 23, 2022, about 18,937,775 bitcoins were mined, and 2,062,225 bitcoins remained, with a total of 90% mined.
20) Theoretically, Bitcoin mining would cease in 2140.’
21) As of 2022, Bitcoin production can be seen to continue for the next 118 years.
22) However, if you take into account the lost bitcoins (if you don’t recover your wallet, it will be permanently dummy data!), the actual number of bitcoins in circulation will be less than this.
23) However, there is no major problem with its use as a currency, since Bitcoin is ‘infinitely divisible’. This means that the earlier you jump into the Bitcoin market, the more Bitcoin you can get, and it provided an incentive for subsequent runners to jump into this Bitcoin market. However, due to the instability of the virtual currency itself, the value is fluid, which makes it similar to stocks.
24) As people’s interest in Bitcoin gradually increased, the difficulty of the problem increased, and now it is at a level that can be solved even if the personal computer is kept on and running for several decades.
25) For this reason, it is a reality that most miners are working in teams (mining coalitions or mining pools). In the early days of Bitcoin, even a normal PC could make some profit by configuring the CPU or GPU in parallel, so malicious code that uses other people’s computers for mining appeared. In the past, even the Rigveda wiki has been caught while planting a script that mines Bitcoin.
26) However, with the advent of dedicated mining machines using ASICs and FPGAs developed exclusively for Bitcoin mining, it became difficult to secure profitability with mining using graphics cards, and eventually graphics cards were withdrawn from the Bitcoin mining market.
27) If you look at the situation in 2017 right now, even if you use 8 Radeon R9 290X crossfires, the hash rate is about 1.12GH/s. s comes out. In a common sense, with a mining machine with 96,000 times better mining performance than a graphics card, who would want to mine Bitcoin with a graphics card?
28) As such, the performance of the bitcoin miner is increasing day by day, and the difficulty of bitcoin mining is getting more and more difficult as even large capital is putting their hands on bitcoin mining.
29) Of course, if quantum computers develop in the future and efficient algorithms that can operate effectively enough to reach SHA-256 are developed, it is not known again. However, since it is difficult if the amount of Bitcoin mining rapidly changes due to the number of miners or the performance of the mining machine improving, the amount of computation required for Bitcoin mining to match the mining amount at a constant speed rises in proportion to the mining capacity of the entire network.
30) Participating in mining is difficult. If those who want to start now want to switch to their own GPU, the electricity bill may be higher. No matter how good a GPU is, I earn around 100 to 200 won a day. In addition, in some mining pools, participation is impossible without machines such as ASICs. In response to this situation, Bitzeny, a CPU-only mining coin that resists both ASIC and GPU mining, drew attention in Japan.
31) Bitcoin adopted the SHA-256 hash algorithm, which made it easy to develop dedicated miners employing ASICs.
32) ASIC is an abbreviation of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, which refers to an integrated circuit specialized for a specific purpose. A dedicated miner refers to equipment that is equipped with such ASICs in large quantities to perform only the functions of Bitcoin mining. An example (Antminer S9) dedicated mining machine was able to produce a hash operation performance that cannot be compared to that of a graphics card.
33) On January 13, 2021, the hashrate of Bitcoin reached 157.776m, breaking the highest since issuance.’
34) If mining continues, the mining reward will be halved according to the limited amount. It is usually done in a 4-year cycle. To put it simply, demand increases but supply decreases by 50%.
35) Since the demand for Bitcoin is continuously increasing and the halving is a big issue, a lot of investment capital and speculative capital are flowing into Bitcoin. Taking the first half-life as an example, over 12 months from the start of the half-life, it started at $12 and rose up to about 9417% to $1163, showing an abnormal upward trend.
36) On July 9, 2016, parties were held in the United States, Australia, Finland, Germany, France and Ireland to celebrate the half-life. The actual reward has been cut in half, but the value is rising, and it seems that the party was held to celebrate the (?) Bitcoin ecosystem that survived from 2009 to 2016.
37) There are three types of fees for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. These are the exchange fee charged by the exchange, the transaction fee, and the remittance fee paid by the Bitcoin network itself.
38) The term “fee” in the use of Bitcoin is a complex one to understand, and there are many different explanations interspersed with it. A primary “exchange fee” is incurred as a person who does not have bitcoins must buy bitcoins from an exchange to have bitcoins without mining.
39) The exchange fee is an extra-system cost, and it is money that has to be broken even when purchasing other foreign currencies, so those who discuss the essence of bitcoin sometimes dismiss it as out of the question, but those who get a lot of bitcoin through mining are at this point in their personal life. Rather, there are only those who operate a mining farm that is at least the size of a PC room, so there are hardly any individual users who can get bitcoins that can be used for actual transactions. In the end, it is almost essential to go through an exchange at a currency exchange office to get bitcoin, and it will come as an amount that real users must bear.
40) The “transaction fee” for trading Bitcoin as a trading method, such as stock or FX trading, varies from cryptocurrency exchange to cryptocurrency exchange, but it can be said to be approximately 0% to 0.5% maximum.
41) In the cryptocurrency market, the share of the Bitcoin market capitalization in the total cryptocurrency market capitalization is called Bitcoin dominance.
42) In general, Bitcoin’s dominance drops significantly during a surge, and at the end of the surge, its value is low. CoinMarketCap, a famous cryptocurrency information site, calculates Bitcoin dominance and provides charts.
43) Contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin does not guarantee anonymity and is rather transparent enough to be comparable to other financial institutions. It’s not anonymity in mind like Tor or other services in the first place, it’s just a new kind of currency.
44) It’s just a problem to find the correlation between the real trader and the bitcoin address, and if you find the trader’s bitcoin address, you can easily determine when and how much money was sent to whom at https://blockchain.info, etc., not just the police. You can look it up.
45) However, if multiple addresses are used, it becomes difficult to find an association between this trader and the Bitcoin address. In fact, over the past few years, there have been many rumors that criminal gangs use Bitcoin for remittances, mostly using multiple addresses in this way. In fact, it is very easy to transport a large amount of black money to a distant country and convert it into cash using several wallets. There are opinions that it is better than bulky physical (cash or gold) transport or bearer bonds.
46) In general, in order to convert bitcoin into cash, it is necessary to go through an exchange that exchanges bitcoin for real money. In most countries, to prevent crime through bitcoin, it is mandatory to verify the real name of exchange users. If an exchange is used to exchange bitcoins from very bad sources, state agencies can simply identify the bitcoin owners.
47) A method of transacting in multiple stages in one wallet where black money is concentrated, sending small amounts to multiple wallets, and then sending them to the wallet and multiple exchange IDs (accounts). And in fact, there are quite a few cases in which a few exchanges do not care much about members who want to trade only a small amount, so they only check the basics of the identity verification process and don’t do more.
48) Since Bitcoin adopts a blockchain, a transaction ledger with the same contents is distributed to all users using Bitcoin, so a general centralized upgrade method cannot be used for protocol upgrade. Instead, it uses a method called a fork that branches from the original Bitcoin. There are two types of forks: a soft fork and a hard fork.
49) A soft fork is a fork method that is compatible with the previous block. This method is used to introduce new functions while maintaining the existing block chain. Because it has compatibility with previous blocks, only miners who create new blocks need to use the wallet with the new code applied.
50) Due to the nature of not requiring everyone’s wallet update, and the growing number of features that need to be added and modified as the Bitcoin network evolves, many soft forks have been made. For example, the Multi-Sig feature that requires submitting two or three or more private keys when creating a transaction, or the 12-24 word wallet key feature often found in wallets like Electrum. have.
51) Among the methods to overcome the maximum payment speed limit of Bitcoin that has been encountered since 2016, Segwit is a method to increase the bit utilization efficiency by removing a large part of the header block from the chain block as a way to maintain up-and-down compatibility as much as possible. It has been proposed, but there are many evaluations that it is a workaround that may limit again if the transaction volume increases explosively again in the future.
52) The Bitcoin Core group voted for or against the Segwit update in a democratic way (recorded as a flag bit on the blockchain), and gained a majority in favor, and the update was carried out in August 2017. Unlike the Ethereum crisis, there was no accident in which users were dualized under the block chain of the same name as “Bitcoin”, and it led to the approval and update of most users like the ready-made update, but in the end, this update was “Bitcoin Cash” This resulted in a hard fork fork of a large group of users under the separate name “. This is because the code that reduces the mining efficiency of the dedicated miner ASIC machine is also loaded.
53) Before being listed, Bitcoin Gold was pre-mined 100,000 by the developer. With 300,000 won in 1 Bitcoin Gold, the developer earned 30 billion won. If you have the ability to hard fork, you can easily make tens of billions of dollars.
54) A fanatical fandom called BTC Maxi (short for Maximalist) is mainly active on Twitter. They tend to gather around Michael Sailor, president of MicroStrategy, who is famous for accumulating large amounts of Bitcoin, and the symbol is a composite of the eye part of the profile picture with a shining eye just before the beam.
55) Unlike those who are immersed in bitcoin speculation, the so-called coin junkie, rather than investing in bitcoin, they tend to accumulate bitcoin as much as possible into their account regardless of the rise or fall of the bitcoin price, which is what the early bitcoin community did. It was called HODL, which is the misspelling of HOLD, derived from a single post, and the reverse acronym has the meaning of Hold On for Dear Life.
56) In addition to Bitcoin, derivative currencies such as Litecoin reference exist, and several cryptocurrencies similar to Bitcoin have appeared around 2013. These derived cryptocurrencies are collectively referred to as altcoins.
57) Around 2013, a graphics card was used for Bitcoin operation, and the most popular graphics card among them was the Radeon 280X series. Due to the nature of Bitcoin mining, the higher the double-precision operation is, the more advantageous it is, and the double-precision computing power of the 280X series was comparable to that of the first generation of Titan, which was sold at $999.[26] Thus, 280x cards began to be widely used for Bitcoin mining.
58) However, around 2014, Bitcoin mining equipment (called miners or miners) equipped with a dedicated IC optimized for SHA-256 hash operation appeared in large numbers, and the mining difficulty of Bitcoin rapidly increased, resulting in a graphic card for general-purpose operation. It has reached a point where profitability is no longer suitable. Accordingly, around 2014, a large number of graphic cards used for mining were released in the second-hand market, leading to a sharp drop in middle- and high-end prices.
59) Newegg, an American computer hardware shopping mall, accepts Bitcoin among several payment methods, but in the past, cards issued in other countries were almost rejected, so there was a time when Bitcoin was the de facto only tool.
60) There are also several minor cryptocurrencies, including the name Bitcoin, following Bitcoin. Bitcoin 21, Bitcoin Dark, etc… It has nothing to do with Bitcoin’s blockchain. However, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold, which use the old chain of Bitcoin, are exceptions.
