8 Fun facts about Bitcoin

People who began with a meagre investment of a few dollars in Bitcoin in 2009 have surprisingly turned into millionaires of 2018. Isn’t that mind blowing?

To date there has been just one year – 2014, which saw a decrease in Bitcoin price. Otherwise, its value has multiplied 879,999 times from 2010 to 2017. Many people who sold their coins in the early years still regret their decision. Now, buying Bitcoin is out of question for any middle class person. Being the oldest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has seen many ups and downs and this calls for some astounding fun facts about Bitcoin.

Who’s the creator?

Apart from the name – Satoshi Nakamoto, no one knows who exactly created Bitcoins! In fact, we can’t even say whether it was a man, woman or an organisation. Wild guesses from different people have been heard of now and then, but no one was ever able to find out the real inventor. Is/are she/he/they dead or alive? That’s also a mystery!

Pizza-the first item bought

The very first purchase made with the help of Bitcoin was a pizza. Laszlo Hanyecz was the man who bought two pizzas from Papa John’s at $40. He paid 10,000 Bitcoins for those two pizzas, which will amount to around $84 million today!

Bitcoin Wallet (Source: Unocoin)

Bitcoin’s space travels

Bitcoin cloud mining provider, Genesis Mining sent a Bitcoin paper wallet and a 3D Bitcoin model tied to a weather balloon in space. Two transactions were performed – one when the balloon reached a height of 20 km and another at a height of 35 km.

Losing your key = locked out of Bitcoin forever

Losing your Bitcoin private key or your Bitcoin wallet means losing all your Bitcoins in a go. Unfortunately there’s no way to recover them. A person named James Howell accidently threw away his hard disk containing his Bitcoin wallet and private key. All the Bitcoins that James had mined in 2010 – which was around 7,500 Bitcoins ($63 million) were lost forever.

A rare coin

All of us know that if you have a powerful system with a good GPU, you can easily mine Bitcoins by solving some mathematical problems. But does that mean that any number of Bitcoins can be mined? Of course not! A total of 21 million Bitcoins can exist and presently around 17 million Bitcoins have already been mined and are available for investing and trading in the market. Also about 64% Bitcoins have never been used, and it is possible that they will never be used.

Hidden identities and open secrets

Bitcoin works on blockchain technology which is responsible for recording all the transactions in a public ledger which can be viewed by anyone and everyone. This does not mean that you can view who has sent Bitcoins to whom. Only the amount can be viewed and not the name and account details of the one who transacts. The person’s identity remains hidden, which is why it is a ‘cryptocurrency’.

Computing power

The combined power of 500 supercomputers is 274 Pflops/s whereas the Bitcoin network has a combined computing power of 2,046,364 Pflop/s. This depicts the vast global network of miners in the world.

Any number of cryptocurrencies may come and go, but Bitcoin will always remain the best of all, not because it was the first, but because of the change it has brought about in the world. If you still haven’t bought Bitcoins, you can always buy them through Unocoin.