Bitcoin: A Primer – Investigating Bitcoin
Few innovations have generated as much controversy and potential for worldwide economic transformation as have Bitcoin and bitcoin. Bitcoin is an open source, decentralized technology platform upon which bitcoin, the digital currency, depends. On August 1, 20151, the digital currency was priced at $280 per bitcoin, with 14.5 million units in circulation, $4 billion in stored value, and a nearly 90% share of global digital currency market capitalization (market cap).
Bitcoin was birthed in the ferment of the 2008 financial crisis by Satoshi Nakamoto, a person or organization that to this day is anonymous. The antithesis of a centralized banking system, Bitcoin is decentralized and does not require a central repository or single administrator to process transactions. Instead, it relies on the cryptographic security of mathematics and the computational power of distributed computers to create a digital ledger that is transparent to the world.