Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a digital asset and a payment system invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, who published the invention in 2008 and released it as open-source software in 2009. The system is peer-to-peer; users can transact directly without an intermediary. Transactions are verified by network nodes and recorded in a public distributed ledger called the block chain. The ledger uses bitcoin as its unit of account. The system works without a central repository or single administrator, which has led the U.S. Treasury to categorize bitcoin as a decentralized virtual currency. Bitcoin is often called the first cryptocurrency, although prior systems existed. Bitcoin is more correctly described as the first decentralized digital currency. It is the largest of its kind in terms of total market value.

Bitcoins are created as a reward for payment processing work in which users offer their computing power to verify and record payments into a public ledger. This activity is called mining and miners are rewarded with transaction fees and newly created bitcoins. Besides being obtained by mining, bitcoins can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services. Users can send and receive bitcoins for an optional transaction fee.

South Africa

South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa, is the southernmost sovereign state in Africa. It is bounded on the south by 2,798 kilometers of coastline of southern Africa stretching along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, on the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and on the east by Mozambique and Swaziland, and surrounding the kingdom of Lesotho. South Africa is the 25th-largest country in the world by land area, and with close to 53 million people, is the world's 24th-most populous nation. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere.

South Africa is a multiethnic society encompassing a wide variety of cultures, languages, and religions. Its pluralistic makeup is reflected in the constitution's recognition of 11 official languages, which is among the highest number of any country in the world. Two of these languages are of European origin: Afrikaans developed from Dutch and serves as the first language of most white and coloured South Africans; English reflects the legacy of British colonialism, and is commonly used in public and commercial life, though it is fourth-ranked as a spoken first language.

Bitcoin network

The bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer payment network that operates on a cryptographic protocol. Users send bitcoins, the units of currency, by broadcasting digitally signed messages to the network using bitcoin wallet software. Transactions are recorded into a distributed, replicated public database known as the block chain, with consensus achieved by a proof-of-work system called "mining". The block chain is distributed internationally using peer-to-peer filesharing technology similar to BitTorrent. The protocol was designed in 2008 and released in 2009 as open source software by "Satoshi Nakamoto", the name or pseudonym of the original developer/developer group.

The network timestamps transactions by including them in blocks that link to form a chain called the block chain. Such blocks cannot be changed without redoing the work that created each block down the chain from the modified block. The chain serves as proof of the sequence of events and that this sequence was verified by a majority of the bitcoin network's computing power. As long as a majority of computing power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they will outpace attackers. This provides a means of providing security not found in other protocols.

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