Core Principles

• Decentralisation: Unlike traditional financial systems, "there is no 'central' server or point of control." Bitcoin's decentralised nature is maintained through a process called "mining," where participants compete to solve mathematical problems while verifying transactions.
• Currency Creation and Issuance: Bitcoin is "minted" through mining at a "fixed and diminishing rate." Initially, 50 new bitcoins were created per block. This rate halves approximately every four years (every 210,000 blocks). This "finite and diminishing issuance creates a fixed monetary supply that resists inflation." The total supply is capped at approximately 21 million bitcoins (2,099,999,997,690,000 satoshis), expected to be reached around 2140.
• Double-Spend Problem: Bitcoin elegantly solves the "double-spend problem" – a weakness in previous digital currencies – by using a "distributed computation system (called a 'Proof-of-Work' algorithm) to conduct a global 'election' every 10 minutes, allowing the decentralized network to arrive at consensus about the state of transactions."

History & Creator

Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 with the publication of the whitepaper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto combined existing inventions like b-money and HashCash to create a decentralised electronic cash system that doesn't rely on a central authority for currency issuance or transaction validation.