Industry WIKI

Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown person published a white paper under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation. From 2021 to 2025, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender curren

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree, where data nodes are represented by leaves). Since each block contains information about the previous block, they e

Bitcoin was designed by its pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, to work as a currency, but its status as a currency is disputed. Economists define money as a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account, and agree that bitcoin does not currently meet all these criteria.

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software.

In the context of cryptocurrency mining, a mining pool is the pooling of resources by miners, who share their processing power over a network, to split the reward equally, according to the amount of work they contributed to the probability of finding a block. A "share" is awarded to members of the mining pool who present a valid partial proof-of-work. Mining in pools began when the diffi

OpenTimestamps (OTS) is an open-source project that aims to provide a standard format for blockchain timestamping.

Proof of work (also written as proof-of-work, and abbreviated PoW) is a form of cryptographic proof in which one party (the prover) proves to others (the verifiers) that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended. Verifiers can subsequently confirm this expenditure with minimal effort on their part. The concept was first proposed by Moni Naor and Cynthia Dwork