Born in 2009: The Bitcoin success story

Image Source; Pixabay

It feels as if Bitcoin (BITCOMP) had always existed, but the well-known Blockchain was created in 2009, only 13 years ago. Since then our view of international currencies have totally changed. Concerning borderless payment, nothing seems impossible anymore. Bitcoin attracts the attention of international investors, big or small, because of its well-known price swings. Its appearance on the market has led to the creation of other digital currencies such as Litecoin, Ethereum and Ripple. Without doubt, a digital financial revolution took place in the last decade – and it still continues.

 

The Beginning of Bitcoin

The Bitcoin was invented in 2009 as the first means of payment based on blockchain. The white paper was published under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, but that person does not really exist, it is a pseudonym for someone who hides behind it. On investopedia.com technology and business experts discuss who Satoshi Nakamoto is, they mention the names Dorian Nakamoto, Craig Wright and Nick Szabo. The first one is a Japanese-American engineer, the second an Australian scientist and the third an American computer engineer and legal scholar. The riddle is not solved yet, so the speculations go on. 

The Bitcoin at first place promised the ability to conduct financial transactions without the intervention of governments. It is built on digital signatures and decentralized. Nevertheless, at the beginning the bitcoin theme just interested a handful nerds around the globe. But after a while, more attention was aroused and quite a lot of people began to invest in the new means of payment. To produce more bitcoins, much more digital memory was needed and so-called prospectors stepped in to donate their personal computing power. These persons are payed for their friendly support in bitcoin. 

 

A glance at the present

In these early days no-one could imagine how big the project would grow within a few years. Today it is possible to pay with Bitcoin both in the digital and the analogue world. But not every provider has joined the payment network, this still has to be worked on. Quite a lot of online casinos are on board now, some of them allow transactions with Bitcoin, others prefer cooccurring cryptocurrencies. The website casinos.co.za lists the best virtual venues with their most important characteristics. The payment methods and bonus systems are mentioned there as well as the respective VIP loyalty programs and the games selection. The clear list was composed by gaming experts who gathered information from the top-rated online casinos in South Africa. 

High margins – and high risks

The bitcoin is supported by a dedicated collective providing more and more storage place. These computers are spread all over the world, some donate just little memory, others a huge amount of it. They are operated by different individuals, so the whole system is very difficult to corrupt or to hack. Not only the special secure system convinced investors to acquire bitcoins, but also the incredible height of profit margins. In 2017 the Bitcoin jumped 740 percent upward before falling from 19,807 to 5,967 Dollars. And all this within only five months! Not only on the platform fortune.com, but in nearly every online magazine on the world journalists discussed the Bitcoin Bubble which made many people rich and ruined others. Although the price reversals were tremendous in the past, experts believe that the Bitcoin has come to stay. 

Image Source; Pixabay

What makes Bitcoin so special?

Bitcoin always remained a kind of cross-platform currency. It did not specialize like other cryptocurrencies. Its use was not limited. You can pay with it anywhere in the world where it is accepted. In 2020 PayPal announced to accept Bitcoin as a payment method on its platform: a huge step forward on the road of success. In the Bitcoin network, all active nodes must be able to verify the same transaction. They also have to share their registers with all other users of the network. This keeps the whole system transparent, it is nearly impossible to corrupt it. Some other digital currencies work the same way, but others have relaxed the rules to reduce the processing time. The verification time of Bitcoin takes about 10 minutes, this is really long in a digitalized world and a significant drawback. The Ethereum network just takes about 13 seconds and Ripple XRP needs 4 seconds to confirm a transaction, said Christopher Lewis of talkmarkets.com. So, Bitcoin is not the leader on every field – but on most of them.