History
On 3 January 2009, the bitcoin peer-to-peer cryptocurrency was created by a person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and released as open-source software in 2009. The whitepaper was published on 31 October 2009, outlining the design of bitcoin.[2] Nakamoto never explicitly claimed to be Satoshi, and the name has never been verified. With low market cap and volatility the cryptocurrency saw little use as a medium of exchange during its first years until the middle of 2017, when a series of high-profile incidents – such as the collapse of South Korean exchange Bithumb – increased mainstream interest. [4]
Several alternative blockchain technologies have been proposed, including proof of stake, proof of work and proof of space.[17][18][19] Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions across multiple computers so that they cannot be altered retroactively. The idea for the concept was proposed in 2008 by a group of researchers led by Nick Szabo. It was further described in a white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, who created the first implementation of the features that now characterize blockchain technology.
Another type of blockchain is a public ledger, which can also be used for financial transactions, although public blockchains use a different consensus mechanism. Cryptocurrency wallets, such as the offline version Electrum, often make use of public blockchains such as Bitcoin's, since they cannot be accessed by malware infecting a user's computer.
If you want to use the cryptocurrency without (or instead of) owning bitcoins, you can deposit money in a bitcoin exchange account from another source. This could be a bank account or a credit card linked to a bank account. These services assume that you are willing to trust the exchange to make financial transactions. They also assume that you trust that the exchange will not go out of business and will not siphon your money. In the case of Mt. Gox, both of these assumptions were not true.
A variant of this is the use of publicly audited accounting (also called bookkeeping) in a blockchain with bookkeeping entries corresponding to separate blocks.[3][4][5]
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Implementations
Bitcoin Core is a full-node implementation of the bitcoin protocol and helps the user to generate bitcoin. Bitcoin Core is free software and is being developed by a large community of volunteers. For comparison, the Internet Archive uses 44 GByte of blockchain data[36] when stored on content-addressable storage.[37] See Resources below