The environmental effects of bitcoin are also substantial. Īs bitcoin is pseudonymous, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to its ban by 51 countries as of 2021. For this reason, it has been widely described as an economic bubble.
Bitcoin is rarely used for transactions with merchants and is mostly seen as an investment. 1 In 2021, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation. Based on a free market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown person. Nodes in the bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.īitcoin ( abbreviation: BTC or XBT sign: ₿) is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. This article contains special characters. Initially ₿50 per block, halved every 210,000 blocks
