Development
Bitcoin was invented by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto[9] in 2009 and released as open source software in October 2009.[10] A paper outlining the design and use of bitcoin was published in January 2008,[11] and a paper was presented to a conference in San José, Costa Rica, on April 7, 2008, titled "The first electric autonomous decentralized digital currency".[12] This paper was written by Nick Szabo, who conceived of bitcoin in 1997 as a "bit gold" inspired by Charles Hoskinson's "bit gold" idea.[13] The source code for bitcoin was created in September 2008 and made available online through a website,. https://mostbet-bahis-site.com/ In January 2009, the first block of bitcoin was broadcast to the network, which contained 48 Transactions. The genesis block was received by the first nodes in the network on January 3.
The design features a new digital currency with no physical form and no central issuer. Transactions are created by decentralized nodes running bitcoin client software and mining software.[9]
Each block is hashed and added to the blockchain. Starting with the first block, every block is created by linking it to the previous blockheader in the blockchain via a hash. The hash also serves to confirm the validity of the block's transactions and the integrity of its timestamp. This is needed to prevent an attacker from altering a historic blockchain transaction.[14] It is possible to create a counterfeit bitcoin by altering transactions recorded in the blockchain.
Blocks are linked together much as email attachments in a chain. Each block has a link to the previous block(s), forming a chain.
Mining
Mining is the process of adding transactions to Bitcoin's blockchain. This is done by solving a computationally difficult puzzle, which is referred to as "proof of work". The first blocks of Bitcoin were mined using CPU power, until the use of GPU mining rigs made CPU mining prohibitively expensive. As of February 2017, CPU mining accounts for an average of 1% of global electricity usage, and ASICs have been developed which are much more power-efficient than CPUs, making CPU mining uneconomical.[15][16] As of July 2018[update], three ASIC manufacturers (Bitmain, Canaan Creative and Samsung) control the majority of the network's mining power, and the industry is split between large-scale state-owned enterprises such as AntPool, BTC.com and ViaBTC, and small-scale domestic enterprises.[17]
Block mining