What is bitcoin? - Bitcoin Tutorial

- Bitcoin allows people to securely exchange value online without a bank, government, company or any other central authority between them. That was revolutionary when it was first described in a paper that was announced online on Halloween 2008, written by someone who used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, Bitcoin was only an idea then but after two months of planning and software development, the first block of 50 Bitcoins was released. This is known as the genesis block. If things had stopped there, it would have just been an interesting experiment. A few things eventually brought Bitcoin wider attention and caused its value to rise. First, people started accepting it in exchange for real-world goods and services. It was mostly criminals in those early days, drawn by Bitcoin's easy transfer and semi-anonymous nature. But soon, legitimate organizations, such as WordPress and the Internet Archive started accepting Bitcoin for donations and payments. Second, new services gave people ways to buy, sell, learn about and protect their Bitcoins. Now, most of those companies failed but some were backed by experienced entrepreneurs and those were successful. Third, people started speculating, buying Bitcoin on the hopes that it would increase in value, driving the price up further. Others used Bitcoin as a way to store their wealth. And finally, thousands of variations on Bitcoin appeared, differing in how they were created, secured and marketed. You might have heard of some of them. Ethereum, Dogecoin and Cardano are three popular cryptocurrency networks. These in turn spawned other new products, such as non-fungible tokens or NFTs. I will talk about NFTs in this course but if you'd like to dive deep into them, check out Jonathan Reichental's LinkedIn Learning course, Introduction to NFTs: Non-fungible Tokens. As cryptocurrencies increased in complexity, sometimes the name of the blockchain split off from the cryptocurrency itself. For example, the Bitcoin blockchain's cryptocurrency is called Bitcoin but the Ethereum blockchain's cryptocurrency is called Ether while the Cardano's blockchain currency is called ADA. A cryptocurrency is only one thing that a blockchain makes possible. Cryptocurrencies attracted the attention of both government regulators and thieves. Billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been misappropriated or misplaced, most of it from common business fraud, incompetence, or bad technical implementations. However, none, as far as I know, has revealed basic flaws in the cryptocurrencies themselves, although they've suffered and recovered from some major technical issues. As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies grow, they face new challenges, some technical, some social. But on the whole, they have always bounced back. Their value has grown increasingly stable over time while new services have emerged to support their users. But if history's any guide, the one thing we can expect from cryptocurrencies is more surprises.