Bitcoin or BTC is probably the most famous cryptocurrency in the world. It was proposed as a concept by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, an inventor or group of inventors whose name we still don’t know. A year later, the website bitcoin.org was launched, allowing developers from all over the world to make changes in the open code. As a reward for their efforts, they received bitcoins.
Of course, in the early days of bitcoin, this currency wasn’t too valuable. In fact, there were instances where developers paid for two pizzas with 10,000 BTC. It’s needless to say that things have changed drastically over the years. Today, bitcoin is worth much, much more and its value is expected to get even higher. So, what’s the reason behind bitcoin’s success?
The main advantage of bitcoin over traditional currencies is that it operates without any need of using the services of banks. Rather than having a central authority take care of the transactions, everything is done through a peer-to-peer technology. But, it’s not only transactions that are carried out by the users, the same goes for bitcoin mining, that is, the issuing of new bitcoins.
As a result, bitcoin has much lower transaction fees than credit cards. On top of that, it allows hassle-free international payments, as well as a high level of security and anonymity through the use of encryption.