Bitcoin

Bitcoin is an open source peer-to-peer money and payment network, sometimes referred to as a cryptocurrency.

See also

• Bitcoin_Education_Guide (Will eventually be ported into regular Wiki articles)
• Bitcoin History Timeline
• Bitcoin Media
  • The Bitcoin Wars
  • Bitcoin Educators
• Bitcoin Entrepreneurs

• Bitcoin Beginners: Public and Private Keys

As of 2022, Bitcoin uses the RIPEMD160 has function, so there are 2^160 possible Bitcoin addresses, which is a 49-digit integer when written in decimal form.¹⁾

Bitcoin mining is a lottery process that costs energy to operate computers to perform calculations.²⁾

See also Bitcoin Mining

Bitcoin's capped supply solves a variety of social problems associated with the Cantillon Effect.³⁾

Gresham’s Law (Aristophanes): Bad money drives out good (when two currencies are required by law to be accepted in parity).

Gresham's law is often stated as, “bad money drives out good”. This aphorism does not fully explain itself, however, so we demonstrate with an example:

When a currency exists in a market place, coined in a metal, and a sovereign ruler decides to save money on new coinage by producing a coin decreed by the authority to be equivalent, but made with an inferior metal (a less useful, thus cheaper to purchase metal), then people in the marketplace spend the “bad (inferior) money” first, while hoarding/saving the “good (superior) money” any time they have the option. Thus, Lord Gresham explained to Queen Elizabeth how coins seemed to have vanished from the marketplace. In the end, we should expect the saved (low velocity) coins to accrue in value over time relative to the spent (high velocity) coins regardless of the decree of values. Such pegs eventually break, as did the bimetallism policy of the U.S.

The notion of Gresham's law can be used to argue in support of the ideas of Bitcoin Maximalism” in the short run and “hyperbitcoinization” due to Bitcoin's non-inflationary protocol. Thier's law comes into play when the bad money's velocity reaches such a high rate that it undergoes hyperinflation relative to the good money to the point that nobody will even take it as a medium of exchange because they cannot get rid of it fast enough for any profit from the exchange not to tend negative. Thus the bad money simply dies off as a currency.

The mysterious and unknown inventor of Bitcoin went by the pseudonym 'Satoshi Nakamoto'. There has been much debate over the years, and investigation into who Satoshi Nakamoto might be or have been.

The first ever Bitcoin transaction took place between Satoshi Nakamoto and cypherpunk Hal Finney, the latter of whom was actively engaged with Satoshi.

Gerald Votta makes a reasoned case for Edward Ho to be Satoshi.⁴⁾

He is very bright and has the resources, though most Bitcoin experts do not think that Elon Musk is Satoshi.

Few people believe that Paul Le Roux is Satoshi Nakamoto, but Bitcoin.com published an article with some circumstantial evidence connecting him to Satoshi.⁵⁾

• What is the Bitcoin Psyop? -Questions for (James) Corbett⁶⁾

The Bitbo stats page is highly educational, showing features such as last block time, mining difficulty adjustments, block height, chain size, transaction fees, and more.

• The Bitcoin Rainbow Chart at Blockchaincenter.net puts current price and price history into perspective using metrics that have become standard in the Bitcoin community.

As of March 31, 2022, ButBitcoinWorldwide.com reports that there are 106 million Bitcoin owners, 200 million Bitcoin wallets, 53 million Bitcoin traders, and 400,000 daily Bitcoin users.⁷⁾

• Cryptocurrency adoption world map at Statista.

In 2021, El Salvador became the first nation to make Bitcoin legal tender, and gave some Bitcoin to every El Salvadoran. Not every aspect of that experiment has gone smoothly.⁸⁾

During the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous people have been de-banked and are looking for banking and payment solutions.

• Tallycoin is a fundraising site that takes donations in Bitcoin and distributes them to causes.

• Bitcoin Transaction Fee Estimator & Calculator (PrivacyPros.io)

https://www.kristovatlas.com/auditing-crypto-wallets/

Hardware wallets operate with many addresses for greater security. These can make use of deterministic wallet systems.

• Coldcard

The Lightning Network is a way to quickly make Bitcoin transactions without waiting for block settlement.

• Lightning Roulette is a provably fair game.

While Bitcoin can be used as electronic cash between phones, some people purchase gift cards with it in order to simplify the gateway between the Bitcoin and fiat shopping economies. Here is a brief list of population Bitcoin spending outlets (August, 2022):

• BitRefill brags that you can “live on crypto”, advertising over 5,000 products including (fiat currency denominated) gift cards.
• Coincards Gift cards
• GiftOff Digital Gift Cards

The growing culture that appreciates Bitcoin has begun to coalesce into a market demographic. There are numerous Bitcoin conferences, large and small. There are also Bitcoin shopping site.

• Merchandise at the Texas Bitcoin Project

See also Bitcoin Media

• Bitcoin Transcripts