What is Bitcoin?
Bnews editor
Bitcoin (BTC) is a digital currency with a constant total of 21 million. Like the Internet, it has the characteristics of decentralization, globalization, and anonymity. Transferring Bitcoin to the other side of the earth is as simple as sending an email, with low cost and no restrictions. Bitcoin is therefore used in cross-border trade, payment, remittance and other fields.
Due to its broad prospects and huge imagination space, the price of Bitcoin has continued to rise since its birth in 2009. In 2011, the price of the currency reached 1 US dollar, and in 2013 it reached a maximum of 1,200 US dollars, exceeding the price of 1 ounce of gold. It is known as "digital gold" (the current price is about 450 US dollars).
Bitcoin began in 2008 with the paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (Chinese Version)" by the mysterious figure Satoshi Nakamoto. In the six years since its birth, Bitcoin, as an unprecedented new currency, has experienced countless market tests and technical attacks and has always stood firm. Now Bitcoin has grown into a currency system with millions of users around the world, tens of thousands of merchants accepting payments, and a market value of up to tens of billions of US dollars.
Bitcoin-related companies have also attracted nearly $1 billion of venture equity investment from hundreds of well-known venture capital funds, companies, and individuals, including many traditional financial giants, such as Visa, Nasdaq, and Citi: "Visa, Nasdaq and other giants invested $30 million in blockchain company Chain"; MasterCard: "MasterCard and New York Life Insurance joined the new round of financing of Digital Currency Group"; Goldman Sachs and IDG Capital: "Bitcoin company Circle received $50 million in financing"; PayPal co-founder, eBay co-founder, Qualcomm: "Startup Bitcoin company 21 received a huge amount of $116 million in financing"; New York Stock Exchange (NYSE): "Coinbase officially completed a $75 million Series C financing"; Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and Li Ka-shing's venture capital: "Bitcoin business trading platform BitPay raised $30 million, with a valuation of $160 million" and so on.
Some venture capital funds also directly purchased Bitcoin. For example, in the auction of Bitcoin seized by the FBI on the dark web black market, Tim Draper, one of the most well-known investors in Silicon Valley (lead investor of Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, and Tesla), spent $20 million to purchase 32,000 Bitcoins, and the Bitcoin Investment Trust in the United States purchased 48,000 Bitcoins, etc. (NetEase News "Three anonymous bidders bid away 50,000 Bitcoins from the Silk Road")
The Internet has broken the regional and national boundaries of information dissemination. Freedom of information has greatly promoted the development of human economy, politics, and culture. Bitcoin will further break the financial and value dissemination barriers based on national boundaries and have a profound impact on the world.
Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance at the University of California, made the following comments when nominating Satoshi Nakamoto as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics:
I strongly recommend that this award be given to Satoshi Nakamoto. The invention of Bitcoin can be said to be revolutionary. Satoshi’s contribution will not only revolutionize the way we think about money, it will likely upend the role of central banks in monetary policy, and will disrupt high-cost remittance services like Western Union, completely eliminate the 2-4% middleman transaction tax charged by Visa, MasterCard and Paypal, eliminate cumbersome and expensive notarization and intermediary services, and in fact completely change the way legal contracts are conducted.
