Cryptocurrency
It all started with Bitcoin in 2009 backed by the Blockchain, a public ledger accessible to everyone, making transactions hard to reverse and difficult to fake, because information is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems known as nodes.
Bitcoin is a decentralized (no governing authority) digital currency that you can buy, sell and exchange directly, without an intermediary like a bank. Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, originally described the need for “an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.”
Bitcoins are created through mining. Bitcoin mining is the process of adding new transactions to the Bitcoin Blockchain. Bitcoin mining is a complex job that requires miners to deploy computers in a race to solve mathematical puzzles that verify transactions. To entice miners to keep racing to solve the puzzles and support the overall system, the Bitcoin code rewards miners with new Bitcoins. This is how Bitcoins are created. Bitcoins are considered the gold standard of cryptocurrency. There is a limit of 21,000,000 bitcoins that can be mined. So far up to 2021, we have mined around 18,000,000 bitcoins.