$BTC

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities.Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.

Number of bitcoin transactions per month.

Background:

Prior to the release of bitcoin, there were a number of digital cash technologies, starting with the issuer-based ecash protocols of David Chaum and Stefan Brands.The idea that solutions to computational puzzles could have some value was first proposed by cryptographers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in 1992.

31 October 1996 NSA paper

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12 years prior to creating Bitcoin the NSA published the white paper HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH

Adam Back:

The idea was independently rediscovered by Adam Back who developed hashcash, a proof-of-work scheme for spam control in 1997.The first proposals for distributed digital scarcity-based cryptocurrencies were Wei Dai's b-money and Nick Szabo's bit gold.Hal Finney developed reusable proof of work (RPOW) using hashcash as its proof of work algorithm.

In the bit gold proposal which proposed a collectible market-based mechanism for inflation control, Nick Szabo also investigated some additional aspects including a Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement protocol based on quorum addresses to store and transfer the chained proof-of-work solutions, which was vulnerable to Sybil attacks, though.