Cryptocurrency has become quite the rage today with constant updates, big buys, and even bigger sellouts. While people have been talking about cryptocurrencies for a long time since 2016, the hype has become quite mainstream today even in Canada.
The government is fairly supportive of its citizens’ buying, selling, and trading in cryptocurrency, welcoming the era of digital finance. This leads us to the question of how well you really know cryptocurrencies.
Sure, you may be aware of the mechanism of blockchain and crypto mining, the Dogecoin hype, and Elon Musk creating shockwaves across the crypto market with his statements. But do you know the best-known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, well enough?
Today, we will change that by mentioning the 10 most interesting Bitcoin facts. Want to know more about the king of cryptocurrency? Keep reading below!
Pizza Deal
If you’re wondering about the first Bitcoin deal, you’re at the right place because this will blow your mind. Contrary to being a huge business transaction, the first Bitcoin exchange was made over a pizza trade. Laszlo made world history by paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas from Papa John’s for $25.
Today, the value of those Bitcoins is well over USD 114 million! If you think that Laszlo has any regrets about making the trade, you’re wrong. He went down in history and will forever be known for his contribution to turning Bitcoins into a financial trade instrument.
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The Milisatoshi
Did you think that the smallest unit of a Bitcoin is a Satoshi? You’re in for a surprise, because there is a metric smaller than a Satoshi; the Milisatoshi. There are several arguments among enthusiasts, but a Satoshi is still a divisible denomination. If you want to buy or sell Bitcoin in Canada, knowing one Satoshi is made up of 1000 Milisatoshi helps with transactions!
Not the First Cryptocurrency
Contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin is not the first cryptocurrency to exist; it is just the cryptocurrency that is the most popular. The first cryptocurrency was created by David Chaum and named DigiCash. This was back in 1989, long before our fan-favorite Bitcoin came into existence, making it the ancestor of Bitcoin. Even though it failed after a while, DigiCash was considered to be a remarkable achievement in the world of electronic payments.
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People Have Received Free Bitcoins
How would you feel knowing that there was a time when new site users got 5 BTC free upon registration? Gavin Andersen came up with the idea for a new website promotion to give away up to 5 BTC to every new user in 2010. There existed no time machines to take you back then, but today some websites give away Satoshis; however, the value is tiny compared to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Ghosts
Do you know how difficult it is to recover the private key to your Bitcoin account? About 60 percent of Bitcoins in circulation are known as ghosts because their owners lost access to their private keys. So they just exist within the system without anyone to use or claim them; hence, the term Ghosts.
If you have Bitcoins in your wallet, keep your private keys noted safely on an offline register too; the code once lost will not just take away your right to use BTC in transactions, but also lose access to your own BTC wallet!
The Value of Overflow
There was an error that took place on the BTC block 74638 that accidentally produced 184 million Bitcoins! This error was resolved within the next five hours, with the surplus bitcoins destroyed. However, the event is remembered as the Value of Overflow today.
The Bitcoin community chose to acknowledge the error and create a new version in order to remove the extra Bitcoins that were produced.
Secure Private Keys
What will it take for a person to hack into a private key for Bitcoin? Hacking into the security code used by the Bitcoin owner is almost an impossibility, making it extremely secure. However, hackers and fraudsters remedy this difficulty by scamming owners to steal their private keys using various means.
Do you remember the ghosts? These unclaimed Bitcoins are still floating around the system because their private keys still cannot be hacked into!
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SuperSpeed Network
Summit is the world’s fastest functioning supercomputer, working at the speed of 122.3 petaflops. This value means a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, which seems like quite a substantial processing power. However, the mind-blowing thing about the whole Bitcoin network is that it operates at the processing power of approximately 80,704,290 petaflops.
While the superspeed may be staggering, the Bitcoin network can only add blocks to its blockchain, while the supercomputer can multitask with several functions.
Limited Circulation
What makes Bitcoins highly valuable is also their limited numbers in circulation. There exist only 21 million Bitcoins in the entire market, and as of now, about 18 million bitcoins are in circulation presently. It comes up to about 80 percent of the total Bitcoin supply being mined already.
If you’re worried that the world will run out of bitcoins to circulate, don’t! They use a technique called halving, which reduces the value of rewards given to the miners for unearthing new bitcoins.
So until 2140, the world will still have plenty of Bitcoins to mine. The most recent halving occurred in 2020 when the reward for mining bitcoins was reduced to 6.25 Bitcoins from 12.5.
Power Consumption
The cumulative Bitcoin mining farms together take up about 60 terawatt-hours of electricity, approximately 6 x 1010 kilowatt-hours. This consumption of power supersedes the whole of Ireland, which consumes about 5,000 kilowatt-hours of yearly electricity supply!
Most Bitcoin mining farms were located in China due to the low costs, but are beginning to shift elsewhere given China’s stance to ban the use and mining of cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin has been the most banked-on, popular, and stable cryptocurrency throughout the last decade, but many people don’t know the most intriguing facts about it; we hope our article helped with that and made your day interesting with these lesser-known BTC facts!