What is Bitcoin?
Published: 2022-12-20 11:51:02

Bitcoin (BTC) is a cryptocurrency, a virtual currency designed to act as money and a form of payment outside the control of any one person, group, or entity. It provides an alternative payment system to fiat currencies issued and controlled by central banks. Bitcoin is not managed and maintained by any one central entity but by a network of users and miners who verify transactions on the blockchain through cryptographic techniques.

## How does Bitcoin work?

It is critical to understand that Bitcoin is made up of three distinct components that work together to form a decentralized payment system:

1. The Bitcoin network - which operates as a peer-to-peer system where users exchange bitcoin with others on the network without the assistance of middlemen to carry out and validate transactions. 
2. The native cryptocurrency of the Bitcoin network, called bitcoin (BTC) which could be likened to money but unlike government-issued currencies such as the dollar or euro, Bitcoin allows online transfers without a middleman such as a bank or payment processor. It is also a a store of value similar to gold. 
- The Bitcoin blockchain is much more than just a form of cryptocurrency: It is the foundation upon which the majority of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, are created. Because it guarantees the accuracy of every transaction, the Bitcoin blockchain is exceptional. Nothing is missed from the network because everything that happens on the blockchain is recorded. The entire record of an action is accessible to anyone in the system once it has been time-stamped, recorded, and stored in one of the information blocks to data that is kept in "blocks" of information and then permanently connected as a "chain" by other "blocks" of information.

No matter how many transactions are awaiting confirmation, Bitcoin is set up to allow new blocks to be added to the blockchain about every ten minutes.

The blockchain's openness allows all network users to view and analyze bitcoin transactions in real time. The likelihood of double spending, a problem with online payments, is decreased by this technology. When a person tries to spend the same cryptocurrency twice, this is known as double spending.

### Bitcoin Innovations

**Lightning Network**

 Bitcoin was never intended to be scalable. It was intended to be a decentralized payment system that users could use anonymously and from anywhere. However, one of its drawbacks was its popularity: transactions became much slower and more expensive than intended. As a result, developers created cryptocurrency layers, the first of which was the primary blockchain. Each layer beneath that was a secondary, tertiary, and so on.

Each layer complements and adds functionality to the layer above it. In that light the Lightning Network is a second layer for Bitcoin that uses micropayment channels to increase the capacity of the blockchain to conduct transactions more efficiently- In simple terms, the Lightning Network (LN) allows participants to use their digital wallets to send BTC to one another for free. [Read more](https://decrypt.co/resources/bitcoin-lightning-network)

**SegWit**

Before now, Legacy addresses were the original BTC addresses, now SegWit addresses are the newer address format with lower fees.

SegWit stands for Segregated Witness, where Segregated means to separate and Witness refers to the transaction signatures involved with a specific transaction. In a nutshell, it is an improvement over the current bitcoin blockchain in that it increases the block size limit of a blockchain by removing signature data from Bitcoin transactions. This creates more space to add more transactions to the chain when portions of a transaction are withdrawn. [Read more](https://bitpowr.com/blog/bitpowr-wallet-now-supports-bitcoin-seg-wit-addresses) 

**Taproot**

The Taproot upgrade was suggested by Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell in January 2018. Three years later, on June 12, 2021, the 90% mark for blocks mined with miner support was reached. It means that some encoded data was left in 1,815 of the 2,016 blocks that were mined during the course of the two-week period by miners to show support for the upgrade.

The Taproot upgrade simply groups several signatures and transactions together.
On the Bitcoin network, digital signatures are necessary to validate transactions. They are produced with the aid of private keys and checked against those of others.

Before the introduction of Taproot, the network of Bitcoin required each digital signature to be verified against a public key, which made transaction verification time-consuming. The time needed for sophisticated multi-sig transactions that require numerous inputs and signatures was doubled by this technique. [Read more](https://cointelegraph.com/bitcoin-for-beginners/a-beginners-guide-to-the-bitcoin-taproot-upgrade) 

**Conclusion** 

Bitcoin has gained widespread acceptance and popularity over the years, with more and more people choosing to use it as a payment method and store of value. Though Bitcoin isn't yet optimized to handle the kinds of transaction volumes that the digital currency is capable of producing, ideas behind products like Lightning Network is changing this and making Bitcoin more attractive for everyday use.

In addition, the introduction of SegWit is a significant step toward resolving it’s scalability issues and enable it to process more transactions more quickly and cheaply 

Bitpowr supports Segwit addresses to also serve as a commitment to providing better solutions and features to help reduce business overhead cost.

Check out [our documentation](https://docs.bitpowr.com/docs) to learn more about our wallet services and other related products.  [Contact sales](https://www.bitpowr.com/contact#contact) or send an email to [sales@bitpowr.com](mailto:sales@bitpowr.com) to get started!