#Crypto2025Trends
word of the day on binance
Bitcoin (BTC) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that operates as a medium of exchange independent of central authorities. It can be transferred electronically in a secure manner and is verifiable and immutable.
BTC was launched in 2009 and is the first virtual currency to solve the double-spending problem by timestamping transactions before broadcasting them to all nodes in the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin protocol offered a solution to the Byzantine generals problem with a blockchain network structure, a notion first created by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1991.
The Bitcoin whitepaper was published in 2008 by an individual, or a group of people, under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto", whose identity remains unknown.
The protocol uses the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm based on SHA-256d to achieve consensus within the network. The network has a target block time of 10 minutes and a maximum supply of 21 million tokens, with a decreasing token issuance rate. To prevent fluctuations in block time, the difficulty of the network's blocks is readjusted using an algorithm based on the times of the last 2016 blocks.
With a block size limit of 1 megabyte, the Bitcoin Protocol supported both Lightning Network, a Layer 2 infrastructure for payment channels, and Segregated Witness, a soft fork designed to increase the number of transactions in a block, as solutions for the scalability of the network.