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21 Fun Facts About Bitcoin

How Many Do You Know?

21 Fun Facts About Bitcoin

Here are twenty-one interesting facts about Bitcoin (as of March 29, 2022). 

How many do you know?

Bitcoin 

  1. Bitcoin was created by a pseudonymous person or persons known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Their true identity is still a mystery. The Bitcoin whitepaper was published by Satoshi to a cryptography mailing list on October 31, 2008.
  2. On May 10, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10,000 bitcoin for 2 Papa John’s pizzas in Florida. This was the first recorded Bitcoin payment for goods, and was valued at about $40 at the time. As of this writing, it’s now worth over $460 million.
  3. The Bitcoin network is secured using a decentralized computer network across the internet.  This is done using a system called Proof-of-Work mining, or PoW. PoW mining is a decentralized consensus mechanism that requires members of a network to expend effort solving an arbitrary mathematical puzzle to prevent anybody from gaming the system.
  4. The computers solving these puzzles are called Bitcoin miners. Miners earn rewards, paid in bitcoin, for verifying a new block of bitcoin transactions. Miners who successfully validate a block earn a reward of 6.25 bitcoin. Many miners work together in mining pools, enabling them to earn typically lower rewards but more frequently.
  5. The last bitcoin will be mined in 2140.
  6. The special computer chips used to mine bitcoin are called ASICs (application-specific integrated circuit). The Antminer S19 Pro, a top-of-the-line modern new ASIC miner costs between $15,000 and $17,000
  7. Bitcoin’s network utilizes a specific algorithm called SHA-256. SHA stands for Secure Hash Algorithm.
  8. Transactions are recorded on the Bitcoin network through the use of blocks, where transaction data is permanently recorded. A block records some or all of the most recent transactions not yet validated by the network. Once the data are validated, the block is closed. 
  9. These blocks are connected to each other in a chronological manner linearly, and thus the entire network is known as a blockchain. 
  10. The Bitcoin hash rate is the number of times per second that computers on the Bitcoin network are hashing data to verify transactions and perform the encryption that secures the network. As of this writing, the total bitcoin network hash rate was around 200 million terahashes (1 trillion hashes) per second.
  11. Another vital part of the Bitcoin network is a Bitcoin node. A Bitcoin node is any computer that runs a bitcoin implementation and stores the entire blockchain. Nodes validate each block and transaction before adding them to the blockchain.
  12. According to bitnodes.io, at this writing there are over 15,000 reachable bitcoin nodes in 86 countries. The countries with the most known Bitcoin nodes are the United States, Germany, France, Netherlands and Canada.
  13. A Bitcoin hard fork is a radical change to the protocol of bitcoin’s blockchain that effectively results in two branches, one that follows the previous protocol and one that follows the new version.
  14. There have been dozens of Bitcoin hard forks or other copies since 2017. The most well known and contentious resulted in Bitcoin Cash (BCH) which later itself hard forked resulted in Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV). 
  15. The #1 corporate holder of bitcoin is Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. They hold 654,885 Bitcoin, or 3.12% of the total supply.
  16. The #2 corporate holder of bitcoin is MicroStrategy. They hold 125,051 Bitcoin.
  17. In 2021, Tesla became the first S&P 500 member to buy bitcoin. They hold 43,200 bitcoin on their balance sheet.
  18. There will only be 21 million bitcoin ever created. However, out of this, an estimated 3.7 million bitcoin have been lost forever, leaving only 17.3 million bitcoin that can ever be accessed and sold.
  19. There are only about 2.3 million bitcoin available to buy on cryptocurrency exchanges currently.
  20. There are 36,614 Bitcoin ATM’s around the world, according to Coin ATM Radar.
  21. Bitcoin became legal tender alongside the US Dollar in El Salvador in 2021.

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This content is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute trading advice. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose. The author of this article may hold assets mentioned in the piece.

Author

Alexandre Lores is a personal finance writer from Tampa Bay, Florida, with the goal to help one million people achieve financial freedom. He has spent over five years studying markets and economics, finding Bitcoin in 2017 and never turning back. He frequently appears on TV and in online news articles and is a regular Twitter spaces host.

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