Industry WIKI

On July 15, 2020, between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC, 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised by outside parties to promote a bitcoin scam. Hackers used social engineering against Twitter employees to gain access to administrative tools, allowing them to post the tweets directly. The scam tweets asked individuals to send bitcoin currency to a specific cryptocurrency wallet, with the

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

Bitcoin and politics influence each other in several ways. Governments of several countries use Bitcoin in various capacities, and some politicians use Bitcoin in their electoral programs.

In 2013, Welsh computer engineer James Howells mistakenly disposed of a laptop hard drive containing the private key for 8,000 Bitcoin in the Docksway landfill in Newport, Wales. Howells subsequently assembled a team of specialists and secured funding to excavate the site, but Newport City Council refused permission, citing galvanic corrosion of the device and health concerns of city re

Bitcoin City is a planned smart city project in La Unión, El Salvador. The planned city is intended to be a tax haven, and to use geothermal energy to power Bitcoin mining. The feasibility of its reliance on both geothermal energy and Bitcoin have been the subject of criticism, alongside concerns regarding delays in the project's financing and construction.

El Salvador was the first country in the world to use bitcoin as legal tender, after it was adopted as such by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 2021. It has been promoted by Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who claimed that it would improve the economy by making banking easier for Salvadorans, and that it would encourage foreign investment. In 2022, more Salvadorians

The Bitcoin Law (Spanish: Ley Bitcoin, pronounced [ˈlej biðˈkojn]) was passed by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador on 8 June 2021, giving the cryptocurrency bitcoin the status of legal tender within El Salvador after 7 September 2021. It was proposed by President Nayib Bukele. The text of the law stated that "the purpose of this law is to regulate bitcoin as unrestricted legal tend

The bitcoin protocol is the set of rules that govern the functioning of bitcoin. Its key components and principles are: a peer-to-peer decentralized network with no central oversight; the blockchain technology, a public ledger that records all bitcoin transactions; mining and proof of work, the process to create new bitcoins and verify transactions; and cryptographic security.

Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) is a cryptocurrency that is a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Satoshi Vision was created in November 2018 by a group of individuals led by Craig Steven Wright, who has claimed since 2015 to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the original bitcoin.

Bitcoin scalability refers to the capability of the Bitcoin network to handle large amounts of transaction data on its platform. Records (known as blocks) in the Bitcoin blockchain are limited in size and frequency to prioritize security and decentralization by keeping the cost of running a Bitcoin node affordable. With an average block creation time of 10 minutes and a block size limit

BitPay is a cryptocurrency payment service provider headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It was founded in May 2011 by Tony Gallippi and Stephen Pair. BitPay provides crypto payment processing services for merchants and a cryptocurrency wallet available on mobile and desktop.

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

Cryptocurrency is a type of digital asset that uses distributed ledger, or blockchain, technology to enable a secure transaction.

A cryptocurrency ATM (automated teller machine) or Bitcoin ATM is a kiosk that allows a person to purchase Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by using cash or debit card. Some Bitcoin ATMs offer bidirectional functionality, enabling both the purchase of Bitcoin and the sale of Bitcoin for cash. In some cases, Bitcoin ATM providers require users to have an existing account to transact on

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.

El Zonte is a town in La Libertad Department in El Salvador. A popular tourist destination, El Zonte has been described as a "world surfing mecca". Playa El Zonte (English: El Zonte Beach; nicknamed Bitcoin Beach) became one of the first locales in El Salvador to accept bitcoin as a payment method, and inspired the country's adoption of bitcoin as a legal tender from 2021 until 2025.

The environmental impact of bitcoin has been characterized in the literature as significant, particularly due to its energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and electronic waste. Bitcoin mining, the process by which bitcoins are created and transactions are finalized, is energy-consuming due to it requiring a large amount of compute and results in carbon emissions. According to the 2025 Ca

Green Dot Corporation is an American financial technology and bank holding company headquartered in Austin, Texas. It is the world's largest prepaid debit card company by market capitalization. Green Dot is also a payment platform company and is the technology platform used by Apple Cash, Uber, and Intuit. The company was founded in 1999 by Steve Streit as a prepaid debit card for teenag

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 crypt

The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment protocol built on the bitcoin blockchain. It is intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes (independently run members of the network) and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem.

Luke Dashjr is an American software developer known for his long-standing role in the development of Bitcoin Core and for co-founding the Bitcoin mining pool Ocean.

Strategy Inc., stylized as Strategy₿ and formerly known as MicroStrategy, is an American company that provides business intelligence (BI) and mobile software. Founded in 1989 by Michael J. Saylor, Sanju Bansal, and Thomas Spahr, the firm develops software to analyze internal and external data in order to make business decisions and to develop mobile apps. It is a public company headquart

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.

Ouroboros is a family of proof-of-stake consensus protocols used in the Cardano and Polkadot blockchains. It can run both permissionless and permissioned blockchains.

The Pineapple Fund was a philanthropic project by an anonymous individual which gave away 5,057 bitcoins to 60 charities. The amount was valued at $86 million in December 2017. Some of the themes supported were medical research, environmental conservation, human rights and psychedelic therapy.

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

Segregated Witness (SegWit), formally known as Segregated Witness (Consensus layer), is an implemented soft fork change in the transaction format of bitcoin.