One bitcoin is divisible to eight decimal places. Currency codes for representing bitcoin are BTC and XBT. The unit of account of the bitcoin system is the bitcoin.

11.2 Energy consumption and carbon footprint.

The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Oxford English Dictionary advocate the use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases. No uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization exists some sources use Bitcoin, capitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoin, lowercase, for the unit of account. It is a compound of the words bit and coin. The word bitcoin was defined in a white paper published on 31 October 2008. Ī few local and national governments are officially using Bitcoin in some capacity, with one country, El Salvador, adopting it as a legal tender.

Others have used it as an investment, although several regulatory agencies have issued investor alerts about bitcoin. Some investors and economists have characterized it as a speculative bubble at various times.

Bitcoin has been criticized for its use in illegal transactions, the large amount of electricity (and thus carbon footprint) used by mining, price volatility, and thefts from exchanges. They can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services. 1īitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. The currency began use in 2009 when its implementation was released as open-source software. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.īitcoin ( ₿) is a decentralized digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries. This article contains special characters. ^ The supply will approach, but never reach, ₿21 million.

^ May 2020 to approximately 2024, halved approximately every four years.

^ Very early software versions used the code 'BC'.

^ The symbol was encoded in Unicode version 10.0 at position U+20BF ₿ BITCOIN SIGN in the Currency Symbols block in June 2017.

Initially ₿50 per block, halved every 210,000 blocks 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' Ġ.1.0 / 9 January 2009 (13 years ago) ( )Ģ2.0 / 13 September 2021 (6 months ago) ( ) ₿ (Unicode: U+20BF ₿ BITCOIN SIGN (HTML ₿ )) Not to be confused with '฿' for Thai baht.

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