5 Fun Facts You Probably Didn't Know About Bitcoin

5 Things You Might Not Know About Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin (BTC) is both a cryptocurrency and an international currency payment system created in 2009 by an anonymous inventor, known under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

It is the most popular cryptocurrency in the world and more and more people want to own it, but there are some things you may not know about it.

In this article we will show you 5 things that you may not yet know about Bitcoin, if you really want to start from the basics Learn what bitcoin is on Young Platform Academy.

Bitcoin is the father of over 400 altcoins

Today, there are thousands of cryptocurrencies on the market but the interesting thing is that over 400 of these are derived from Bitcoin through direct or indirect forks.

Bitcoin forks (currencies born from the same code as Bitcoin) have always tried to catch up or equal the well-known cryptocurrency, but have apparently failed.

A hacker generated about 184 billion Bitcoins in 2010

On August 15, 2010, in an incident known as the “value overflow incident,” an unknown hacker attacked the Bitcoin blockchain, creating 184.467.440.737,09551616 BTC out of thin air. The attack occurred at block 74638.

Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto immediately got to work. Within 5 hours of the incident, version 0.3.1 was released, which prevented future Bitcoin creation through this exploit. The 184 billion bitcoins were then deleted. The blockchain generated by BTC version 0.3.1 became the dominant blockchain that everyone uses today.

Limited number of Bitcoins

There is a limit to the number of Bitcoins that can exist on the market and it is set at 21 million. At this moment there are already almost 19 million bitcoins in circulation, which means that almost 90% of the 21 million have already been mined.

Not to worry, there will still be BTC to mine until 2140 and this is due to the way miners are rewarded. Miners are currently rewarded with 6,25 BTC for each block added to the blockchain, and every four years the reward is halved. The next halving is scheduled for 2024.

The first Bitcoin faucet distributed 5 BTC per visitor

A Bitcoin faucet is a reward system, in the form of a website or app, that distributes rewards in the form of satoshis, or 0,00000001 Bitcoin, which visitors can claim in exchange for completing a captcha or task described by the site.

Gavin Andresen created the first Bitcoin faucet in June 2010, which gave away a generous 5 BTC to each visitor. The goal was to promote the adoption and use of Bitcoin.

Satoshi is not the smallest unit of BTC

Many people think that the Satoshi is the smallest measurable unit of Bitcoin, since 1 Satoshi is equal to 0,00000001 BTC. In reality, there is an even smaller unit of measurement of BTC, already used within the Lightning Network. This is the Millisatoshi (MSAT) which represents one thousandth of a Satoshi. Consequently, these are the values ​​to consider:

1 SAT = 1000 MSAT

1 SAT = 0,00000001 BTC

1 MSAT = 0,00000000001 BTC