Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency. It was created by an anonymous person, or group of persons, and published as a white paper under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. That is an important point that we will come back to. Bitcoin is a computer program that operates as a network with exactly one job: Accounting. The Bitcoin network guarantees who has what, at what time. The tricky thing about almost anything digital is how easy it is to replicate. Ctrl-C, or right-click your mouse, and you have duplicated the text you just selected, and then you can paste it wherever you want. It only takes you a few seconds to duplicate someone’s work. Napster helped us spread MP3 files around the internet. You can see how easy it is to copy digital products. The trick that Satoshi solved is the ‘double spend’ problem, and the Bitcoin network keeps anyone from sending the same unit of account to more than one address simultaneously. You can read about the details of this, but essentially this is the great computing feat that Bitcoin accomplished, there is a limited supply of the account, and each unit can only be in one address at a time.
Accounting? Well, technically a ledger. The Bitcoin network is running complicated math all the time to establish who has how much. The Network is verifying how much bitcoin is at each address. The network allows you to send any amount of your bitcoin (divisible down to 0.00000001) to any other address electronically, very rapidly. The bitcoin protocol agrees what address has and had the bitcoin, and the new address where the bitcoin went. An address is sometimes called a wallet. It is probably more correct to state that the wallet is the program you would use to manage your bitcoin. The network is cryptographically secure, which means it is secret/unhackable. I have more than one address, but the first one I created in 2017 looks like this: 1JLUzLDUCfXeVyEMyrY9NkBEkzCYik2dbV
No one can remember that string, and no one has to memorize it, but you do need to have it stored somewhere. You will notice QR codes being used as an easy way to store and share those strings. This is because everyone has a smartphone in their pocket with a camera that connects to the internet and can translate that sting of characters into a digital address. So, you could send me BTC, if you wanted, by typing in that address in the send field from the wallet that you are using. It’s fine for me to show you the wallet address, because the private key I need to use to send anything from my wallet is even longer and harder to hack. No one is going to guess my private key. That makes it safe for me to put this address on display, and that is why we call it a public key or public address.
The Bitcoin network is constantly running on computers all over the planet, and they are verifying what was sent from which address to a new address. Once the network agrees on this, they store that information in a Block. All of these blocks are chained together, and hence the BlockChain. Every single Block verifies all the prior information. It’s astonishing that Satoshi put all this together, eh? You can search up my address (or any address) on a blockchain explorer and see the history of transactions to and from that address. Here is an example of the address I typed above at BlockChain.com. I sent a small amount of bitcoin from Coinbase to that address on Nov 30, 2017, equivalent to approximately $1. You could also send any amount of bitcoin (down to 1 ten-millionth of a bitcoin) to that address and it would be forever encoded in the bitcoin blockchain. The fact that so many computers are simultaneously running this software makes it very hard to change, or corrupt, or hack, or attack. As more participants join the network, each of these aspects gets harder. No government or corporation has a dominant power over the network.
Now, another very important piece is creating new bitcoin. The code that is the bitcoin program awards new bitcoin to the computer that solves the math first. That sentence dumbs down the process considerably. What actually occurs is hundreds of thousands of computers are racing around the world to solve this math and get the reward. What is 'the math?' That is deciphering the hash of the block. A hash is a sort of digital silhouette of a file. It's not the file itself, but more of a distinct and unique shape of a file that is unique to a file. If the file is the same, whether it is on your computer or my computer, it will have the same silhouette, but if even one bit or character is different within the file, the hash (silhouette) is different. This technology has been around for years, longer than Bitcoin.
The reward for doing the math first has been termed ‘mining.’ The people/companies running the computers doing the mining are incentivized to do the work because they get a reward. Approximately every 10 minutes, the math is solved and a 'miner' (or a pool of miners) gets the reward. The reward will steadily decline until all bitcoin have been mined in approximately the year 2140. When the network started, the computer code put in place agreed there would be a maximum of 21 million bitcoin every mined. So far, in August 2021, as I am writing this, 18.79M bitcoin have been mined, out of that 21M. The network has this scarcity built into the program. This is a key factor of why bitcoin is sound money. There is a known, finite amount of this digital currency. The central bank (Federal Reserve Bank in the USA) can simply invent additional money and distribute it to banks. Governments have the ability, since they control the money and the money supply, to increase the supply of money. This increase in money supply inevitably causes debasement of the monetary base which leads directly to inflation. Since the USD is the reserve currency of the world, most Americans haven’t felt inflation. We have heard about it, in post-WWII Germany, and in modern day Zimbabwe, Argentina, and Venezuela. And isn’t Japan doing this too? Yes, yes, and yes. The Covid-19 Pandemic has caused the central banks to print even more money. And now, during the 2020-2021 pandemic and shutdowns, we have witnessed the United States Federal Reserve invent over 25% of all USD ever created. (That link takes you to the St. Louis Federal Reserve M2 Money Stock supply graph over time.) The inflation effects of this have not been felt by the average American, yet. But we ARE witnessing the effects of this free money in the form of other assets rising in price relative to the dollar. Observe the price of stocks, houses, and indeed, BITCOIN, relative to the USD.
1 bitcoin has been worth 1 bitcoin ever since the network was put in motion. However, how much 1 bitcoin is worth in USD changes as more and more people recognize the power of this network. Bitcoin is a hard asset. Much like anything else in this world, nothing has value unless someone else is willing to trade you something else for it. As people and corporations and institutions realize this, bitcoin is going to continue to increase in price. This is due to the digital scarcity. There will never be more than 21M bitcoin, but there will always be more than 7 Billion people on this planet. The sooner you buy some, the better. Every single bitcoin (or fraction of a bitcoin--remember you can buy as much or as little as you would like) you buy is taken away from the supply of bitcoin that someone else can buy. If you were following the Gamestop Saga in at the end of Jan 2021 and saw the influence of WallStreetBets and their Diamond Hands, you can see an analogy here. I do not plan on selling any of my bitcoin anytime soon, maybe never. Microstrategy has been buying bitcoin, very publicly, since July 2020, starting with $500M. The CEO, Michael Saylor, intends to never sell bitcoin. Tesla bought $1.5B worth of bitcoin in January 2021. Relative to the USD, these have been outstanding purchases in a very short period of time (months). Here is a succinct website of where some large bitcoin holdings are. You can now purchase a Tesla vehicle with Bitcoin, but the Tesla company has stated they are going to accrue more bitcoin, and not convert that transaction back to USD. Even if you ask for a refund, you get the refund in USD. This shows the corporation’s desire to hold bitcoin.
Okay, we have covered a lot. You have heard that bitcoin has a finite amount (21M) and there is programed scarcity. This whole network started in January 2009. Satoshi published a paper on a website for people to read and download, and start running the software. The software is open-source, which means anyone can see it, download, and run it (and also they could tweak it, and create new/competing cryptocurrencies---more on this later). The network has been running nonstop since 2009. There was no large reservoir of bitcoin saved just for Satoshi, or for anyone else (some of the newer cryptocurrencies DID have this, which takes away from the 'decentralized' argument of why crypto is important). There is no government that has influence over the supply or the location of the bitcoin. The internet makes this possible. Anyone in the world can run the software. When the network first started, people ran the software on their computer in their house or at their job. However, as more and more folks caught on to this idea, some enterprising companies started making special chips that only run the bitcoin software. These chips are very efficient, and only run the bitcoin code--you can’t play Minecraft or surf the internet on those special mining computers. Companies have been manufacturing these chips since around 2015 or so. Nowadays, there are special computer manufacturers that build a computer which is really just a metal case full of these chips (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit - ASIC). Bitcoin mining companies literally have warehouses full of these computers running the code. They pool their resources together in the race to solve the math equation first, and therefore receive the bitcoin reward. Imagine a warehouse full of racks of computers running the bitcoin software. These mining companies use electricity to run the computers and solve the math problem. It behooves the company to set up where electricity is cheap, and also where the outside air temperature is cool--Iceland or Greenland for example, where you can have hydro- or geothermal energy and pull in outside cool air to keep your computer rigs from overheating. Some people would argue that this resource intensity is a negative to the bitcoin system. People argue that the energy expenditure of the bitcoin network is greater than country X for example. This is a valid argument, however, I have a few counter-arguments to this. What is the energy expenditure of gold mining, refining, storage, and transportation globally. Is that greater or less than bitcoin? What about the electricity use of the banking industry and their ATMs? Christmas lights? Clothes dryers? When do you get to decide if someone else's energy use is 'appropriate?' The REASON that so many people are mining bitcoin simultaneously is because it is valuable. The network is not requiring thousands of computers to run simultaneously--the desire to earn the rewards drives people to invest in the system. This increased computing power contributes to the strength of the network. Therefore, it is somewhat of a feature, not a bug. This function is due a portion of the bitcoin called Proof of Work. The Proof of Work is that in order to achieve the reward of bitcoin, the network agrees that the miner did the job of computing the hash. Recall that the hash is the math problem that the bitcoin miners are racing to solve. This is important, and it is the part of the bitcoin code that causes the energy expenditure. Subsequent cryptocurrencies have created a newer verification process called Proof of Stake. I will cover this later, but essentially it is an improvement in a blockchain protocol that will change the amount of electricity required to verify the transactions. Suffice it to say that Bitcoin was the original protocol, but as more people got involved in this science, different opinions and improvements were made on Satoshi’s original idea.
The improvements in the field of cryptocurrency have come in two forms: forks and other blockchains. Remember that bitcoin was the first blockchain. Until Satoshi published the white paper, no one had designed a system that would verify unique transactions and prevent the double-spend problem. If there was/is enough consensus on how the bitcoin program should run, the people running the nodes that make up the network can change to a new version of the program. Depending on how significant the change is, it can create a fork in the software. All of the bitcoin created before the fork will exist on the both chains. Bitcoin Cash is an example of a fork. All the bitcoin that had been created before the fork date (Aug 1, 2017) were re-created on the new Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain. That new BCH blockchain also requires computers to run the network to secure the transactions. Everyone that was holding BTC prior to August 1, 2017 now had an equal amount of BCH. BTC traded around $4500 and BCH traded very erratically when it was launched, from $100-$1000. Today, most people hold the BTC (bitcoin core) as the true network, and do not place as much value on the bitcoin cash. You can find other people on the internet that will argue with you over which one is better. This is a situation where the majority wins. You can learn more about bitcoin forks here. There have been some soft forks, that did not require a new blockchain to be invented. These were smaller/incremental/uncontroversial improvements. Larger or more significant changes have come in the form of new blockchains. There have been some outright clones of bitcoin (Litecoin, for example, is a clone originally created by Charlie Lee with a couple of tweaks), and some, like Ethereum, were an entirely new way to run a blockchain. Ethereum introduced smart contracts into the blockchain permanent record. This could look something like an if/then statement. For example: If my account reflects the agreed-upon price, then the car title is in your name. Ethereum also allows other tokens to run on top of its network. You may see these as ERC20 Tokens, and the rapid proliferation of cryptocurrencies are primarily actually tokens running on the Ethereum network. Ethereum has subsequently been improved upon as well. Ethereum is the first-to-market smart contract network much in the same way that Bitcoin was the first-to-market cryptocurrency. The Ethereum protocol is trying to improve to Eth 2.0, although this has not launched yet, and it has some competitors trying to start at that 2.0 level. Particularly leading in this space are Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT). These two blockchains were started by people that left Ethereum to start their own blockchain projects.
Ok, we have covered what bitcoin is, and how it is different. One very important aspect of bitcoin vs all the other coins is the pseudonymous nature of Satoshi Nakamoto. There was no computer scientist or cryptographer (computer scientists that study privacy) by this name. Many people have tried to identify who this person or persons was. I do not pretend to have any expertise on this myself, and am comfortable with the idea that we will never know. An Australian named Craig Wright is claiming to be Satoshi, but his claims have not been agreed upon by the bitcoin community, or the courts where he is fighting this claim over who owns some old bitcoin wallets. And, more specifically, they have been debunked. (Of course, as bitcoin goes up in value, these old wallets are increasingly more valuable, so you can imagine why it is worth it to pursue ownership of these wallets whether they are rightfully yours or not.) The reason the unknown creator is so important, is there is not a single point of failure. There is no one person that can be 'taken down’ to stop the network. The code has been publicly released and will never go away. The white paper was published, and mining did not start for a few months after publishing. There was no ‘dark’ period of pre-mining, or large chunks of bitcoin awarded to preferred addresses because they provided funding, etc. This bitcoin network is joinable by anyone, and therefore an equitable distribution of the money by anyone who chooses to participate. No other currency in the world has been created in such a fashion. Indeed, none of the subsequent cryptocurrencies have been created in this fashion (although Litecoin is close).
Bitcoin, by design, is not related to any government. Any individual in the world can purchase this. No one, including the government, can take it from you if they don’t have your private key. The government can attempt to control a cryptocurrency by controlling the on/off ramps--in other words how you convert fiat currency to bitcoin. However, in my opinion, this is a losing battle. Prohibiting transactions will increase the value, and drive users to different jurisdictions where the currency is legal. I also would put forward that because Bitcoin has now attained a $1Trillion market capitalization, it is ‘too big to fail.’ This is not to say the government will bail out bitcoin like they did to the risk-taking banks during the Global Financial Crisis, but because there are now so many people involved in the bitcoin market, that prices can never go to zero. You can look at CoinMarketCap to see current prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, including those others I mentioned above.
(This post was edited lightly in March 2023 for some clarification, but is 99% the same as when it was published in June 2021.)
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