Bitcoin (BTC) Live Price

Bitcoin (BTC) was the first cryptocurrency that emerged from decades of research into the possibility of a trustless and decentralized form of digital money. The first bitcoins were mined in 2009 by the mysterious developer or development team going by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. After becoming disillusioned with the direction that the development community was taking, Nakamoto withdrew from the project.

The use of Bitcoin as a form of currency began as a novelty, but some organizations that were outside the established payment systems, such as WikiLeaks, began to accept it as a form of donation. By 2012 more than 1,000 merchants had enabled it as a form of payment. As the pace of adoption quickened the value of Bitcoin (BTC) jumped into the $500 to $1,000 range in 2013, where it generally remained until 2017.

As the popularity of Bitcoin increased, concerns grew over the ability of the network to handle the growing number of transactions at an efficient rate. After much debate, the SegWit improvement protocol was implemented in July of 2017. This soft fork allowed for an increased block size and compatibility with the Lightning Network, which is a proposed system for dramatically increasing transaction speeds by performing non-essential operations off of the underlying blockchain.

As the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin still has the largest market capitalization by far thanks to its name cachet and first-mover advantage. Its adoption of the Lightning Network system and future changes to the underlying blockchain technology will determine whether it can compete with the development of newer generations of crypto coins and tokens.