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Have you ever wondered what this magic internet money called Bitcoin is? As an asset worth over 1 trillion dollars and the most popular cryptocurrency, it’s worth considering as an alternative to gold for storing your wealth and unlocking the world of financial freedom.
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is the first-ever cryptocurrency to be created by an unknown entity under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. There is no clear evidence supporting the thesis whether it’s an individual or a group of people. The Bitcoin whitepaper, explaining the basic principles under which the network would operate, was released in the middle of the financial crisis of 2008. Then, the first block, known as the Genesis Block, was mined by Satoshi at the beginning of 2009. The block contained a message about a bailout for banks, which highlighted the antisystemic approach.
Nowadays, Bitcoin is used by millions of people and is considered a scarce commodity. To get there it had to survive many events in its early days, which put the network to a test, such as the hack of a Japanese crypto exchange, Mt. Gox.
Why use Bitcoin?
Bitcoin at first was made to be a peer-to-peer decentralized currency, but its status changed to a store of value due to its inability to adapt without the help of layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network. As of now, it serves more as a store of value than money used for transactions.
Bitcoin is unique due to its limited supply, which consists of 21 million units, each divided into 100 million satoshis. The inflation rate decreases every 4 years thanks to events known as halvings, which slash the production of new Bitcoins by half. The entire supply is expected to be mined by the year of 2140.
The entire network is decentralized and permissionless. There is no need for any intermediary, and you don’t need anyone’s permission—you are in control of your money. You can send small and large amounts of money and get the transaction confirmed within 10 minutes in exchange for a couple of dollars. Bitcoin is borderless, so you can send and receive money from anyone around the world. The best part? Nobody can stop that.
How Bitcoin works
Bitcoin was built on top of blockchain technology. As a result, the Bitcoin network is a public distributed ledger, which is transparent by design. The blockchain is pseudoanonymous—the addresses that are used to transact don’t reveal any personal information unless they are linked to your identity, in which case the transactions are traceable.
In order for a transaction to be confirmed and included in a block, it has to be added to a queue also referred to as a mempool. Transactions with a higher fee are in front of the ones with a lower fee. The next block is being filled with transactions until it runs out of space (around 4MB). Then the process of miners competing to find the solution to the complex cryptographic problem unique to each block starts. The entity to solve it first gets the block reward, which at the time of speaking is 3.125 coins, and has the right to add the block to the record.
Bitcoin's timeline
From an experiment, Bitcoin has grown into a renowned asset. The concept of a decentralized network was published in 2008, and the network launched in the following year. Soon, the first real-world transaction took place, when someone bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 BTC. Since then Bitcoin has experienced successes and failures. It has continued to appreciate as an asset but has experienced events like the hack of Mt. Gox and China's ban on crypto. Institutions started to catch up, and Microstrategy became the most talked about to implement a Bitcoin treasury, thus making its stock more valuable. In 2021 El Salvador became the first country to ever adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender. As of now, multiple Bitcoin ETFs are tradeable on the NYSE, and many institutions are considering adopting the Bitcoin standard.
The risks of Bitcoin
Despite all the advantages it possesses, there are some drawbacks involved. It has been around for some time—it's the oldest cryptocurrency, after all. However, compared to other more traditional assets, it seems risky, is relatively new, and many argue that we can’t be sure how the price reacts when the recession materializes. There are no doubts this statement is justified since Bitcoin was created after the financial crisis and has only been in a period of quantitative easing.
Why Bitcoin matters
Bitcoin is an important breakthrough as it takes away control from banks and makes them less relevant. In contrast, it empowers individuals by giving them sound money they can really own—the kind of money that holds its value, is scarce so everybody wants it, and enables individuals to transact freely. This is why it’s important, because it’s a revolution in the way we think about money and storing value. It resembles gold, but is digital and easily divisible.
