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Bitcoin (CURRENCY:BTC) traded down 2.5% against the dollar during the 1-day period ending at 23:00 PM E.T. on December 22nd. One Bitcoin coin can now be bought for approximately $3,576.61 on exchanges including xBTCe, OKEx, ABCC and IDAX. Over the last seven days, Bitcoin has traded down 12.1% against the dollar. Bitcoin has a total market capitalization of $62.52 billion and approximately $4.79 billion worth of Bitcoin was traded on exchanges in the last 24 hours.
BTC is a proof-of-work (PoW) coin that uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm. It was first traded on January 3rd, 2009. Bitcoin’s total supply is 17,480,612 coins. The official website for Bitcoin is bitcoin.org. Bitcoin’s official Twitter account is @bitcoin and its Facebook page is accessible here. The official message board for Bitcoin is bitcointalk.org. The Reddit community for Bitcoin is /r/bitcoin and the currency’s Github account can be viewed here.
According to CryptoCompare, “Balances – block chain The block chain is a shared public ledger on which the entire Bitcoin network relies. All confirmed transactions are included in the block chain. This way, Bitcoin wallets can calculate their spendable balance and new transactions can be verified to be spending bitcoins that are actually owned by the spender. The integrity and the chronological order of the block chain are enforced with cryptography. Transactions – private keys A transaction is a transfer of value between Bitcoin wallets that gets included in the block chain. Bitcoin wallets keep a secret piece of data called a private key or seed, which is used to sign transactions, providing a mathematical proof that they have come from the owner of the wallet. The signature also prevents the transaction from being altered by anybody once it has been issued. All transactions are broadcast between users and usually begin to be confirmed by the network in the following 10 minutes, through a process called mining. Processing – mining Mining is a distributed consensus system that is used to confirm waiting transactions by including them in the block chain. It enforces a chronological order in the block chain, protects the neutrality of the network, and allows different computers to agree on the state of the system. To be confirmed, transactions must be packed in a block that fits very strict cryptographic rules that will be verified by the network. These rules prevent previous blocks from being modified because doing so would invalidate all following blocks. Mining also creates the equivalent of a competitive lottery that prevents any individual from easily adding new blocks consecutively in the block chain. This way, no individuals can control what is included in the block chain or replace parts of the block chain to roll back their own spends.”
