Bitcoin

Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. They can be exchanged for other currencies,[14] products, and services. As of February 2015, over 100,000 merchants and vendors accepted bitcoin as payment.[15] Research produced by the University of Cambridge estimates that in 2017, there were 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin.There is no uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization. Some sources use Bitcoin, capitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoin, lowercase, to refer to the unit of account.[19] The Wall Street Journal,[20] The Chronicle of Higher Education,[21] and the Oxford English Dictionary[18] advocate use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases, a convention followed throughout this article.In January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence after Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first ever block on the chain, known as the genesis block.[32][33] Embedded in the coinbase of this block was the following text:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.[13]If the private key is lost, the bitcoin network will not recognize any other evidence of ownership;[10] the coins are then unusable, and effectively lost. For example, in 2013 one user claimed to have lost 7,500 bitcoins, worth $7.5 million at the time, when he accidentally discarded a hard drive containing his private key.[53] A backup of his key(s) would have prevented this