Bitcoin

The term “Bitcoin” can either refer to Bitcoin the network, or bitcoin the digital currency. Bitcoin (the digital currency) does not exist in physical form, is not issued or backed by a country’s central bank or government, and relies on cryptographic technology (thus also called crypto-currency). You can earn bitcoin by trading for goods or services with vendors who accept bitcoins as payment, and/or by exchanging bitcoin from/to fiat via a cryptocurrency exchange or a bitcoin ATM, and/or by generating new coins through the bitcoin mining process.

The Bitcoin network is a public, open, borderless, permissionless and tamperproof ledger, which monitors and verifies the transfer of Bitcoins between users, via Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Bitcoin transactions. The Bitcoin network is mathematically designed to generate a maximum supply of 21 million bitcoins. The number of bitcoins generated per (new) block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. As of May 2020, miners are awarded 6.25 bitcoins for each block they successfully mine. The next “halving” will occur in 2024, with the bitcoin award being cut in half from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoin.

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