Introduction to Bitcoin
Catherine Thomas
Financial technology specialist
Catherine provides an introduction to bitcoin - what bitcoin is, how it relates to blockchain, and how it has been perceived.
Catherine provides an introduction to bitcoin - what bitcoin is, how it relates to blockchain, and how it has been perceived.
Introduction to Bitcoin
2 mins 1 sec
Overview
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that can be sent from one user to another on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries. The underpinning technology that maintains the Bitcoin transaction ledger is Blockchain, in which Bitcoin was the first application, though it can be adapted for other uses.
Key learning objectives:
Explain what Bitcoin and Blockchain are
Summary
Explain what Bitcoin and Blockchain are
- "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, published in 2008 by a person or group working under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, defined Bitcoin as a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash, allowing online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
- To get around the double-spending problem, the paper’s proposal was to use transactions stored and transferred using a distributed ledger on an open, public and anonymous network.
- Bitcoin’s function is to maximise the security of its network; security defined as computational power, which makes it expensive to roll back changes to the transaction log.
- Bitcoins are the block reward tokens given to people who improve the network’s computational power through a process called mining.
- Blockchain is the underpinning technology that maintains the Bitcoin transaction ledger.
- Bitcoin was the first application of blockchain. Bitcoin and blockchain are not the same thing. The blockchain that supports Bitcoin was developed specifically for it, but blockchain can be adapted for other use cases.
Catherine Thomas
Catherine is an associate at Outlier Ventures, a venture platform that was the first platform focused on blockchain in Europe. In her role, Catherine manages investor and partner relations, supporting their portfolio and building the Outlier Ventures community. Previously, she spent 3 years working with London & Partners as a consultant to international investors.
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