Ukraine has accepted cryptocurrency donations to fund the resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion, and Iran has used bitcoin to bypass political sanctions.īitcoin has been described as an economic bubble by at least eight recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. For example, El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, although use by merchants remains low. In contrast, a few governments have used bitcoin in some capacity. The Library of Congress reports that, as of November 2021, nine countries have banned bitcoin use, and a further forty-two have implicitly banned it.
Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, when its implementation was released as open-source software. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown entity under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.īitcoin ( abbreviation: BTC or XBT sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency. This article contains special characters. Initially ₿50 per block, halved every 210,000 blocks
