Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the person who designed bitcoin but there’s still doubt about the real identity. Over the years, many people have been linked with the same, including Nick Szabo, Dorian Nakamoto, Hal Finney, Craig Steven Wright, and others. Some people consider Nakamoto might be a team of people. As of May 2017, Nakamoto is believed to own about 1 million bitcoins with a worth of more than $2 billion.
You might’ve heard about bitcoin mining, the process using which bitcoins are generated digitally. So, does this mean there could be an infinite number of bitcoins? That’s not the case. A pre-defined schedule has limited the number of bitcoins. They are slowly approaching a total of 21 million and the mining process is getting harder with each passing day.
Bitcoin addresses are a long string of 34 alphanumeric characters. Using that address, it’s impossible to tell the recipient. Probably, this is the reason why most of the illegal transactions are carried out using bitcoins. To protect the privacy even further, most wallet programs assign the users a portfolio ID, which is also used as a username.
After the first bitcoin transaction took place between Satoshi and Hal Finney in 2009, the first recorded purchase was made for buying pizza worth $25. To do so, 10,000 bitcoins were spent.
According to the experts, Bitcoin networks has a computing power of 2,046,364 Pflop/s. This is my personal favorite fact about bitcoin. If you go ahead and combine the computing power of the 500 most powerful supercomputers, you’ll get a combined fever of 274 Pflop/s.
In 2016, Genesis Mining, a bitcoin cloud mining provider, set bitcoin to space. This was done using a 3D bitcoin model and a bitcoin paper wallet, which were tied to a weather balloon. The whole journey was recorded using a GoPro focused on the model and wallet. Once the weather balloon reached a height of 20 kilometers, the ground team made the transaction to paper wallet. Another transfer was made to the wallet once it achieved the maximum possible altitude of 34 kms.
Transaction of bitcoin, a preferred currency involved in the transaction of illegal goods, can not be reversed. Unlike popular platforms like PayPal, you don’t get second chances while making a transaction.
When the FBI shut down the operations of the Silk Road, it also seized the owner’s assets. In that process, the FBI also became one of the world’s wealthiest bitcoin owners, A report from the Wired magazine claims that the FBI controls as much as $120 million.
Just like you save your money in your online bank accounts, your bitcoins are saved in bitcoin wallet. It’s a highly secure storage wallet. But, if you lose it, your bitcoins are lost forever. It’s also impossible for any person to use your bitcoins from your wallet until you give it to them. Also, if you have a bitcoin address, you can see the number of bitcoins the owner has.
Since its launch, in past one decade bitcoin has become one of the most important phenomenon in the digital world. Its price has touched thousands of dollars. However, the price keeps fluctuating and it remains volatile. Predictions have also been made that bitcoin might fall in the future if it follows the current path. This is because a small number of people, about 10, control the majority of bitcoin. This defeats the entire decentralized nature of currency.
