Facts to learn about the bitcoins

Huynh NguyenAugust 8, 2022

Bitcoin turned the concept of a decentralized monetary system into reality. The fundamental technology on which almost every cryptocurrency and the entire decentralized finance rely is blockchain, which was in bitcoin only. Speaking of finance, you may visit Visit https://www.fintech-insight.com/ to read about bitcoin financial news and reviews.

Bitcoin as an economic ecosystem is doing so well globally that it might become a global currency in the upcoming time. If you are correspondingly too excited to know about the foremost, here are some genuine and surprising facts about bitcoin.

1. Bitcoins are only 21 million

It might be shocking for you, but technically there can never be more than 21 million bitcoins in existence. So the next question is, how many bitcoins have been issued so far? The answer to this question is around 16.3 Million bitcoins were issued in 2017 and approximately 17 Million by 2018. So almost 85% of all bitcoin will be mined by 2023, in just five years, equal to 4 years.

2. 20% of bitcoin are lost forever

The loss of bitcoin starts almost from the day of bitcoin’s inception. According to a survey, it is believed that nearly 20% of bitcoin are permanently gone for good which equals about 7 million bitcoins. The only reason behind this is people lose or forget their private keys. There is only one way to prove ownership of bitcoin: the private key.

3. Difficulty of mining changes every two weeks

Bitcoins are not mined like physical metals or stone; it is mined by special software running on hardware devices called miners. The difficulty level of mining is adjusted every two weeks as per the conditions in the distributed network for that period.

4. 21 million bitcoins were once stolen from a major exchange

The biggest bitcoin heist occurred when more than 800,000 bitcoins were stolen from an operational hot wallet of Bitfinex, one of the most significant cryptocurrency exchanges then.

5. El Salvador has bitcoin as a legal tender

In 2014, the Central Bank of El Salvador banned the use of bitcoin as a currency and warned of legal repercussions for those who continue using bitcoin. El Salvador has BTC as the central entity of its monetary system.

6. Japan is going to be Bitcoin’s biggest market

More than a dozen digital currency exchanges in Japan, and Japan might overtake the US as the most significant market soon. As per the estimation, there were almost 40,000 merchants that accepted bitcoin in Japan in 2017.

7. Bitcoin is most likely to hit 100,000 dollars soon!

People need to know that it’s not a matter of if bitcoin will reach 100,000 dollars but when. As per the survey conducted in 2021, billions of people have already invested in bitcoin, and the number is increasing daily. Moreover, the price of Bitcoin just crossed $32000 again in 2022.

8. Some Bitcoin miner pays $150,000 a year to heat his house

During the advent of bitcoin in 2009-2010, the miners were using their hardware devices like CPU and GPU for mining bitcoins by solving mathematical problems. But as time passed, there was a significant jump in difficulty level and using standard hardware, and it was no longer possible to mine bitcoins as an individual.

The miners started using powerful custom-built hardware devices designed specifically for mining called ASIC miners. These ASIC bitcoin miners are powerful computers specifically designed for mining bitcoins. Since these ASIC devices cost very high, single ASIC miners cost more than $200,000 to mine a single bitcoin.

9. The bitcoin symbol was first there in the domain name registration

It is believed that the first use of the Bitcoin symbol was in the domain registration of satoshidice.com in 2009, which is almost ten years ago, and the symbol remained there till 2013 before a 3d version of the Bitcoin logo was replaced.

10. Every transaction is permanently public

The trades in the BTC complex are visibly presented and simply verifiable. Even though a unique address is used for each transaction, the identity of the people behind that address can be found easily by following all the transactions linked to it, so it’s not that anonymous after all.