What is Bitcoin?

04/06/2020 | Categories: Bitcoin Guides | Published by: BTCGOSU | Last updated: 01/04/2022

Bitcoin (Bitcoin.org) is a payment system created in 2009 by someone called ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. Bitcoin is basically digital money that offers anonymity to users and fast and peer-to-peer transactions. On the surface, Bitcoin works in the same way a credit card or PayPal does but is not controlled by a central authority, meaning that no one will be able to block or seize your bitcoins.

The amount of Bitcoins is limited to 21,000,000 and no one will be able to create more. All Bitcoin transactions are recorded and verified and will stay public forever, meaning that everyone can check them out whenever they want to. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Supply)

Bitcoin uses a Proof-of-Work system also known as mining. Miners are the key pillars of the Bitcoin network and help the blockchain to stay consistent and unalterable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Mining)

What is mBTC?

mBTC is a unit of measurement for Bitcoin and it’s also known as a millibitcoin. This measurement is extremely useful because Bitcoin has gained quite a bit of value over the past years and it’s fairly hard to keep track of all the zeros.

Examples of how to convert mBTC to BTC:

1 mBTC to BTC equals 0.001 BTC
0.1 mBTC to BTC equals 0.0001 BTC

Similarly BTC to mBTC:

1 BTC to mBTC equals 1000 mBTC

What is uBTC?

uBTC is a unit of measurement for Bitcoin equal to 1 millionth of a BTC (0.000001 BTC). It is also called microBitcoin.

Conversion Examples:

1 uBTC = 0.000001 BTC
1 BTC = 1000 uBTC
1 uBTC = 0.001 mBTC

What is a Satoshi?

A satoshi is a unit of measurement for Bitcoin referencing Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. The satoshi is the smallest unit for Bitcoin and it’s equal to 0.00000001 BTC.

Any amount of Bitcoin can be converted into Satoshis, for instance, 0.01 BTC would be 1 million satoshis.

What are Bits?

A bit is a popular unit of measurement used to represent really small amounts of Bitcoin. 1 Bit equals 1 uBTC.

What is an Altcoin?

Altcoins are alternatives to Bitcoin, the first created altcoin was Namecoin back in 2011. There are over 2000 Altcoins (Alts) in 2019 and most of them are peer-to-peer although recently the creation of altcoins has slowed down due to developers using the Ethereum platform to create tokens.

Most altcoins were simply copies of bitcoin at first but have slowly evolved and are now a big part of the crypto market. Some notable altcoins include Ethereum, Ripple and Monero.

Altcoins can generally be bought on exchanges although sometimes they hold an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) where users can buy them before they even hit exchanges.