Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a digital currency that launched on 3 January 2009, created by a person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. It is designed to let any two people transfer value directly over the internet without relying on a bank, payment processor, or government to approve or record the transaction. The core problem it claims to solve is the ability to send a digital asset that cannot be copied or spent twice, without needing a trusted middleman.

Bitcoin runs on a global network of computers that all hold a copy of the same public ledger, called the blockchain. To add a batch of transactions to that ledger, specialized machines called miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle based on the SHA-256 algorithm; the winner adds the next block and earns newly issued bitcoin plus any transaction fees paid by users. Blocks are added roughly every 10 minutes — the 24-hour average block time in the data is 526.8 seconds — and the network automatically adjusts how hard the puzzle is, with the next adjustment estimated at roughly 5.7 percent harder than the current level.

Fees are paid by users who want their transactions included in a block; miners who successfully add a block collect those fees along with the block subsidy. Over the trailing 30 days, the network collected 7,351,097 USD in fees, and over the trailing 12 months that figure was 75,302,761 USD. The 24-hour average transaction fee was 0.27 USD and the median was 0.03 USD, reflecting that most transactions cost very little. The protocol itself retains nothing — there is no treasury mechanism that captures fees, and the revenue figures stored here are zero because Bitcoin has no protocol-level revenue distinct from the miner rewards already captured in the issuance and fee data.