10 Interesting Facts About Bitcoin That You Must Know
Are you searching for facts about Bitcoin? Bitcoin can be defined as a kind of digital currency which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of currency unit, verify the funds and operate independently of a central bank. It is a type of cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin gives room to anonymous and direct transactions between parties with virtually no transaction costs, this happens because it is a virtual currency that involves no bank, payment processor as middle man.
Due to its rapid growth in price, cryptocurrency has attracted more attention from both would-be investors and those that are just curious. Though there are still confusion about the bitcoin and blockchain tech, we are here to unravel the 10 hidden facts we feel you should know about Bitcoin.
1. The inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto remains a mystery figure.
For so many years now, a lot of people have been linked with Satoshi Nakamoto,people such as Dorian Nakamoto, Nick Szabo, Steven Wright, Dorian Nakamoto. A lot of people tend to think and believe the Nakamoto is a team of people who came up to design Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Satoshi Nakamoto is actually the name used by the person who designed bitcoin. Nakamoto is believed to have about 1 million bitcoins with a worth of more than $2 billion as of May 2017.
2. Bitcoin network is much powerful than supercomputers
As reported by experts, Bitcoin networks has a computing power of 2,046,364 Pflop/s. This earns it one of the favorite facts about bitcoin. Computing the power of the 500 most powerful supercomputers, the result will be a combined fever of 274 Pflop/s.
3. It’s impossible to know the sender/receiver details
It is a known fact that most of the illegal transactions are carried out by the use of bitcoins due to its long string of 34 alphanumeric character address. with this, it is impossible to know the recipient of the Bitcoins. In other to protect bitcoins privacy even further, most wallet programs assign the users a portfolio ID, which is also used as a username.
4. Bitcoin has been sent into outer space
Genesis Mining, a bitcoin cloud mining provider in 2016, set bitcoin to space.
This act was carried out using a 3D bitcoin model coupled with a bitcoin paper wallet tied to a weather balloon. The entire journey was tracked using a GoPro focused on the model and wallet. Immediately the weather balloon got to 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.
5. Bitcoins are limited in number
The stories behind bitcoin mining may be very common, the act using which bitcoins are generated digitally. This does not imply that there is a possibility of having infinite number of bitcoins. A pre-defined schedule has limited the number of bitcoins. They are gradually approaching a total of 21 million and the mining process is getting difficult as the day goes by.
6. The FBI has one of the world’s largest bitcoin wallets
As at the time FBI shut down the operations of the Silk Road, they as well seized the assets owner. Via this event, the FBI became one of the wealthiest bitcoin owners in the world, A report from the Wired magazine claims that the FBI controls as much as $120 million.
7. Bitcoin is highly volatile
Since the inception of bitcoin, it has become one of the most important phenomenon in the digital world. Its rate has catapulted to thousands of dollars. The rates keeps going up and down and still remain unstable. There seem to be fear in the minds of people due to its instability, leading to predictions that it may fall in future because number of people control the majority of bitcoin which defeats the entire decentralized nature of currency.
8. Pizza was the first good purchased using bitcoin
In 2009 after the first bitcoin exchange took place between Satoshi and Hal Finney, the first recorded purchase was made for buying pizza worth $25.
9. Losing a bitcoin wallet means losing those bitcoins
This is equivalent to saving money in an online bank account, bitcoins are as well saved in bitcoin wallet, a highly secured storage wallet. But, if lost, there is tendency of loosing the bitcoin forever. With the address of the bitcoin, the number of bitcoin owned by a person can be seen.
10. A bitcoin transfer is irreversible
When Bitcoins are transferred from one account to another, it is impossible to reverse it unlike other transaction platforms.
