5 Units for smaller amounts of bitcoin are the millibitcoin (mBTC), equal to 1⁄ 1000 bitcoin, and the satoshi (sat), which is the smallest possible division, and named in homage to bitcoin's creator, representing 1⁄ 100 000 000 (one hundred millionth) bitcoin. One bitcoin is divisible to eight decimal places. Currency codes for representing bitcoin are BTC and XBT. The unit of account of the bitcoin system is the bitcoin. 11.2 Energy consumption and carbon footprint.Ukraine is officially using bitcoin to collect donations to fund the resistance against the Russian invasion. The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Oxford English Dictionary advocate the use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases.Ī few local and national governments are officially using bitcoin in some capacity, with two countries, El Salvador and the Central African Republic, adopting it as a legal tender. No uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization exists some sources use Bitcoin, capitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoin, lowercase, for the unit of account. It is a compound of the words bit and coin. The word bitcoin was defined in a white paper published on 31 October 2008. Journalists, economists, investors, and the central bank of Estonia have voiced concerns that bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. Some investors and economists have characterized it as a speculative bubble at various times.īitcoin has been described as an economic bubble by at least eight Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Bitcoin has been criticized for its use in illegal transactions, the large amount of electricity (and thus carbon footprint) used by mining, price volatility, and thefts from exchanges. They can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services. 1īitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. The currency began use in 2009 when its implementation was released as open-source software. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.īitcoin ( ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. This article contains special characters. ‹ The template Contains special characters is being considered for merging. › Initially ₿50 per block, halved every 210,000 blocks Not to be confused with "฿" for Thai baht.