BTCUSD
Bitcoin / United States dollar
crypto BitMEX

Bitcoin is the first distributed consensus-based, censorship-resistant, permissionless, peer-to-peer payment settlement network with a provably scarce, programmable, native currency. Bitcoin (BTC), the native asset of the Bitcoin blockchain, is the world's first digital currency without a central bank or administrator. The Bitcoin network is an emergent decentralized monetary institution that exists through the interplay between full nodes, miners, and developers. It is set by a social contract that is created and opted into by the users of the network and hardened through game theory and cryptography. Bitcoin is the first, oldest, and largest cryptocurrency in the world. "Bitcoin" is a label used for a protocol and a currency. Bitcoin, the currency, is bits of data usable outside the limitations of the protocol using second-layer solutions like Lightning Network payment channels. Bitcoin, the protocol, is a distributed, time-stamped ledger of unspent transaction output (UTXO) transfers stored in an append-only chain of 1MB data blocks. A network of mining and economic nodes maintains this ledger by validating, propagating, and fighting to include mempool transactions in new blocks. Economic nodes (aka "full nodes") receive transactions from other network participants, validate them against network consensus rules and double-spend vectors, and propagate the transactions to other full nodes that also validate and propagate. Valid transactions are sent to the network's mempool waiting for mining nodes to confirm them via inclusion in the next block. Mining nodes work to empty the mempool usually in a highest-to-lowest fee order by picking transactions to include in the next block and racing against each other to generate a hash less than the target number set by Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment algorithm. Bitcoin uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to establish the chain of blocks with the most accumulated "work" (a.k.a., energy spent on solved hashes) as the valid chain. Other network peers can cheaply verify the chain's work. Mining difficulty regularly adjusts to maintain Bitcoin's average ten-minute block schedule. Mining nodes add new blocks to whatever chain has the largest accumulated proof of work maintained by a network of economic nodes with downloaded copies of the same chain.