Introduction to Bitcoin

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.