Bitcoin

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency invented. The Bitcoin whitepaper was first released in 2010 by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows who the real identity of Satoshi is.

Bitcoin runs on the Bitcoin blockchain. It was created to be a digital peer-to-peer currency and some countries like El Salvador, are finally starting to accept bitcoin as legal tender. In most countries, it is seen as a commodity like gold.

Digital Gold

Since gold is a scarce, valuable asset that people like to invest in, bitcoin’s nickname is digital gold. It is becoming a store of value which makes sense because only 21 million bitcoin will ever exist. When something is rare it can become valuable.

Bitcoin runs on a proof of work algorithm and there are miners all over the world. It has been heavily criticized for the amount of electricity needed to power the miners.

Bitcoin has the highest market cap of any cryptocurrency and continues to lead the rest of the crypto market up and down. If bitcoin does well, so do all the altcoins.

Bitcoin has been criticized as having no real use case. Some say transactions are too slow and too expensive to be used as a form of payment. The Bitcoin blockchain can process seven transactions per second and each one can take 10 minutes to be completed. This is too slow for real-world spending.

The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin. It adds a second layer to the blockchain where millions more transactions can be processed. It promises instant transactions and much lower fees.

What’s So Special About Bitcoin?

While Bitcoin is not the most private blockchain, as transactions can be viewed on the public ledger, it is the most secure blockchain. The record of transactions cannot be altered because there are so many validators distributed across the world. Furthermore, it would be almost impossible to hack Bitcoin because the hacker would have to attack every single miner at exactly the same time. Bitcoin is also the most censorship-resistant and the most decentralized. The more Bitcoin grows, the more miners there are, the more decentralized and censorship-resistant it becomes.

When people say not to buy crypto “because you might get hacked”, what they fail to realize is that Bitcoin cannot be hacked, but the crypto exchange you keep it on can be. That’s why we always recommend using a hardware wallet.

Some people also mistakenly think that a “new” bitcoin could just be created and many more than 21 million coins could be released. This would not happen because the whole point of having thousands of validators is that they all must “agree”. With crypto in general, there has to be consensus. A “new” Bitcoin would not have any credibility and the miners would never adopt it.

An example of a “new” Bitcoin does exist. It’s called Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and you can buy it today on most exchanges. Bitcoin Cash was created as a hard fork of Bitcoin. It’s basically a copy of bitcoin with some changes to its code allowing it to process transactions more quickly. Yet, it hasn’t replaced the original Bitcoin because it is not the “real” Bitcoin.