Bitcoin Trivia: 20 surprising facts about the cryptocurrency!

Bitcoin is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen. From a user perspective, Bitcoin is pretty much like cash for the Internet. One bitcoin was equal to $1.00 (0,76£) in 2010.
The cryptocurrency Bitcoin reached a new high on Friday November 3 when it surged past the staggering amount of $7,400 (£5,663.55).

1. On 22 May 2010,Laszlo Hanyecz made the first real-world transaction by buying two pizzas in Jacksonville, Florida for 10,000 BTC.

2. The approximate amount of bitcoins mined every day is 3.700.

3. Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown person or persons who designed bitcoin and created its original reference implementation.

4. As part of the implementation, they also devised the first blockchain database. In the process they were the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency. They were active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010.

5. As of 24 May 2017, Nakamoto is believed to own up to roughly one million bitcoins, with a value estimated at approximately $7 billion USD as of November 2017.

6. It is said that Nakamoto is a man living in Japan, born on 5 April 1975.

7. On his P2P Foundation profile as of 2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan,[18] but some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his use of perfect English and his bitcoin software not being documented or labelled in Japanese.

8. 21 million is the maximum amount of bitcoins that can ever exist!

9. Vancouver, is the first city that boasted the first Bitcoin cash machine.

10. No one single entity controls this currency.

11. Mining bitcoins is a term that actually means you’re using a computer program to solve mathematical problems to verify various transactions around the world. Bitcoin miners then get paid a certain number of bitcoins for solving those problems.

12. One of the most integral features about bitcoins is that you can never be forced to pay, nor can you take back a transaction.

13. Hal Finney (4 May 1956 – 28 August 2014) was a pre-bitcoin cryptographic pioneer and the first person (other than Nakamoto himself) to use the software, file bug reports, and make improvements.

14. Bitcoins are held in digital wallets that you need to download before being able to buy bitcoin.

15. Losing a wallet means those bitcoins are lost forever.

16. It’s impossible for people to take money from your wallet without you giving it to them. Additionally, if you know a bitcoin address you can see how many bitcoins they have.

17. While the bitcoins in the wallet may still be in existence because they were recorded on the block chain, they are no longer able to be spent because the wallet is lost. These bitcoins have unique keys to them and so if they’re lost with a wallet, then they are essentially removed from circulation forever.

18. In a 2011 article in The New Yorker, Joshua Davis claimed to have narrowed down the identity of Nakamoto to a number of possible individuals, including the Finnish economic sociologist Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta and Irish student Michael Clear, then a graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College Dublin.

19. Once you have a Bitcoin wallet, you use a traditional payment method such as credit card, bank transfer (ACH), or debit card to buy Bitcoins on a Bitcoin exchange.

20. Some considered Nakamoto might be a team of people; Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who read the bitcoin code, said that Nakamoto could either be a “team of people” or a “genius”; Laszlo Hanyecz, a former bitcoin core developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well designed for one person.