What is bitcoin?
A: Bitcoin (₿) is a decentralized digital currency, without a central
bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the
peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.
Transactions are verified by network nodes through
cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a what?
A: A blockchain.
The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown
person or group of people using what name?
A: Satoshi Nakamoto.
The currency began use in what year?
A: 2009 when its implementation was released as open-source software.
Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as
what?
A: Mining.
They can be exchanged for what?
A: For other currencies, products, and services.
Bitcoin has been criticized for its use in what?
A: Illegal transactions, the large amount of electricity (and thus carbon
footprint) used by mining, price volatility, and thefts from exchanges.
Some investors and economists have characterized it as
a “what” at various times?
A: Speculative bubble.
Others have used it as an investment, although several
regulatory agencies have issued what?
A: Investor alerts.
A few local and national governments are officially
doing what?
A: Using Bitcoin in some capacity, with two countries, El Salvador, and the
Central African Republic, adopting it as a legal tender.
The word Bitcoin was defined in a white paper published
on what date?
A: October 31, 2008.
It is a compound of what two words?
A: Bit and coin.
The bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger that records
what?
A: Bitcoin transactions.
It is implemented as a chain of blocks, each block
containing a cryptographic hash of the previous block up to what?
A: The genesis block in the chain.
A network of communicating nodes running bitcoin
software does what?
A: Maintains the blockchain.
Transactions of the form payer X sends Y bitcoins to
payee Z are broadcast to this network using what?
A: Readily available software applications.
Network nodes can validate transactions, add them to
their copy of the ledger, and then do what?
A: Broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes.
To achieve independent verification of the chain of
ownership each network node stores its own what?
A: Copy of the blockchain.
At varying intervals of time averaging to every 10
minutes, a new group of accepted transactions, called a block, is what?
A: Created, added to the blockchain, and quickly published to all nodes,
without requiring central oversight.
This allows bitcoin software to determine when a
particular bitcoin was what?
A: Spent, which is needed to prevent double-spending.
The blockchain is the only place that bitcoins can be
said to what?
A: Exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.
Individual blocks, public addresses and transactions
within blocks can be examined using what?
A: A blockchain explorer.