Simply, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer version of electronic 'cash' defined by a set of software protocols.

It is a form of digital money that exists independently of any government, state, or financial institution, it can be transferred globally without the need for a centralized intermediary and can be used with a wide range of computing devices, making the technology easily accessible.

With its game-like unanimity, created by an anonomys developer Satoshi Nakomoto, —Bitcoin’s participants use their personal computing power to work and compete in solving the game’s complex puzzle.

The participants who can solve the software’s puzzle, and prove their success to the entire network (mining), are then rewarded with a fraction of a finite commodity that is taken from a sum total of 21 million units.

That commodity is Bitcoin. (BTC)

Because Bitcoin launched in a world where ‘digital cash’ at the time had no established value, it circulated freely and fairly over the internet before evolving into any sort of monetary exchange or store of wealth. There was no guarantee nor any idea of making a profit. The free and open market of participants gave Bitcoin its innate value over time.

By an organic decentralization of trust into a network of users, it soon conceived an emergent and sophisticated global monetary complexity without the need for any central authority, hierarchy, or complex parts. This incorruptibly resilient network (governed by the universal consensus of participants), contained a monetary policy that cannot be manipulated to produce unexpected inflation to benefit an outside party at the expense of its holders.

By enabling humans to trust the medium instead of other humans, this immaculate conception spawned the first decentralized and truly digital property in the history of the human race.

Bitcoin is the world's first open monetary network

Bitcoin can refer to the Bitcoin software protocol as well as to the monetary unit, which goes by the ticker symbol BTC.

‘Bitcoin, with all of its mainstream hype, is not easy to explain. There is no one paragraph that can convey all its crucial properties. Every brief explanation is misleading in some way.’

That’s partly because nothing like Bitcoin has ever existed before, so there is nothing for people to compare it to. Comparisons are automatically made to help understand concepts, but they are inaccurate and lead to wrong conclusions. It challenges numerous preconceived notions about "money," many of which are false, often taken for granted, or ignored. It challenges world views, and that’s uncomfortable for people.

Another reason why it’s difficult to explain is that it has many different and complicated parts, each with different functions – and only by understanding each part can the whole be understood. These complicated parts are easier to grasp if one has a basic understanding of various fields such as Computer Science, Cryptography, Austrian Economics, History of Money, Social Networks, Game Theory, Human Psychology, and Evolution/Natural Selection.

Because of bitcoin’s multifaceted nature, it means different things to different people, however, apart from hours invested, there are no required pre-requisites for understanding Bitcoins innate value proposition.

The Bitcoin Whitepaper

The Motivation

The motivation behind bitcoin; was a computer programmer going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, whose intent was to create a “purely peer-to-peer form of electronic cash” that would not require trust in third parties for transactions and whose supply cannot be altered by any other party. There is, and only ever will be a fixed supply of 21-million BTC.

I.E., bitcoin would bring the desirable features of physical cash (lack of intermediaries, finality of transactions) -to the digital world and combine them with a monetary policy that cannot be manipulated to produce unexpected inflation to benefit an outside party at the expense of its holders.

Nakamoto succeeded in achieving this through the utilization of a few highly technical methods and applications including a distributed peer-to-peer network with no single point of failure, hashing, digital cryptographic signatures, and proof-of-work consensus. *Don’t sweat if you’re not familiar with any of these technical terms, they are merely the derived process and genetic make-up of Bitcoin as a technology and what gives bitcoin its effective “hardness” as a store of value.

Bitcoin's inception acted as a response to 4 major historical issues with what we consider in today's common “money.”

1. Trust of a MIDDLEMAN. 

Bitcoin resolved the prevalent third-party trust issue in which a MIDDLE MAN exists between YOU and your MONEY. I.E. a bank. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment cash system with all transactions disclosed publicly on a distributed and decentralized ledger or “blockchain” enforced by cryptography. Because bitcoin is a distributed peer-to-peer system, there is no “central” server or point of control.

Bitcoins are created through a process called “mining,” which involves competing to find solutions to mathematical problems while processing Bitcoin transactions. Any user in the bitcoin network may operate as a miner using their computer’s processing power to verify and record transactions.

Every 10 mins, on average, a bitcoin miner is able to validate the transactions of the previous 10 mins —and is rewarded with brand new Bitcoin. Essentially, bitcoin mining decentralizes the currency issuance and clearing functions of a central bank and replaces the need for them directly.

2. DOUBLE SPENDING Problem. 

The notorious technological discovery and success of the anonymous developer that created Bitcoin, was solving the “DOUBLE SPENDING” problem for digital money —and did so all without the need for a central administrator. The double-spending problem means that the developers of a virtual currency must prevent users from being able to spend their funds more than once. In other words, in the world of "digital hard-money”, spending the same money twice must be avoided so funds can’t simply be copied and pasted, or recreated in any other way. In a secure digital cash network, the net value of all transfers needs to be equal to $0.

This is a unique problem to digital-type currencies and is even a problem with today’s government-issued digital fiat currency.-> I.E. the problem banks possess when you store or deposit your money, —these institutions double-spend, triple spend, 10x spend, etc, that same money you deposited, into the economy in the form of digital credit. Effectively counterfeiting the nation’s own currency.

As a result of doing this with the countries money (because it is no longer pegged to any scarce commodity), this continuously increases the countries debt burden and effectively contributes to the inflationary “boom and bust” based economy that revolves around unchecked central banking and policymakers that permit it.

Through the utilization of technical processes like Proof-of-Work Consensus, Cryptographic Functions, and a Time Stamp server, generally speaking, these solutions solved the double-spending problem but did so with such significant trade-offs or other limitations that they all failed to gain widespread adoption. Nonetheless, they provided both the ideas and technical foundation that led to the creation of Bitcoin— the world’s first Blockchain network.

3. SCARCITY. 

To combat the historic and humanistic temptation in manipulating the money supply of a country or nation by artificially inflating its own currency and effectively sucking the purchasing power and value from that particular monies holders- by transferring it to the producers, -the answer to the problem was found through the use of mathematical protocols. Bitcoin’s protocol limits the total number of Bitcoin that will ever be created to a fixed total of just below 21 million coins. The profound error correction on bitcoins behalf was ABSOLUTE SCARCITY. 

There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin to be mined and used. These 21 million bitcoins are divisible into 100 million units each (0.00000001 BTC) and are commonly referred to as Satoshis or SATS, named after Satoshi Nakamoto. 

The result of the fixed supply —is that the number of bitcoin in circulation closely follows an easily predictable curve that approaches 21 million by the year 2140. Due to bitcoins diminishing rate of issuance, over the long term, the Bitcoin currency is deflationary by design. And by an additional reference to Metcalfe's law and Bitcoins virtually unchangeable monetary policy, —Bitcoin is expected to increase in value through time, as it cannot be inflated by “printing” new money above and beyond the expected issuance rate.

4. SECURITY. 

Historically, digital attempts at creating a currency ultimately resulted in the technology becoming centralized and, as result, were easy to attack by governments and hackers, eventually leading them down the path of being liquidated out of existence. To be robust against intervention by antagonists, whether by the government or by criminals, a decentralized digital currency was needed to avoid any single point of attack.

Bitcoin is such a system, decentralized by design, and free of any central authority or point of control that can be attacked or corrupted.

Because the security of the network is based on Proof-Of-Work, not access control, the network can be open and no encryption is required for Bitcoin traffic. On a traditional payment network, such as a credit card system, the “payment” is really open-ended because it contains the user’s private identifier (the credit card number). Anyone with access to this identifier can “pull” funds and charge the owner again and again. Thus, the payment network has to be secured end-to-end with encryption and must ensure that no eavesdroppers or intermediaries can compromise the payment traffic, —in transit or when it is stored. If a bad actor gains access to this kind of system, they can compromise current transactions or even worse take your identity.

Bitcoin is dramatically different. A Bitcoin transaction authorizes only a specific value to a specific recipient and cannot be forged or modified. It does not reveal any private information, such as the identities of the parties, and cannot be used to authorize additional payments. Therefore, the Bitcoin payment network does not need to be encrypted or protected from eavesdropping. In fact, you can broadcast bitcoin transactions over an open public channel, such as unsecured WiFi or Bluetooth, with no loss of security.

How does Bitcoin work?

Bitcoin is a distributed public ledger, and owners of Bitcoin can access and transmit their Bitcoin from one digital address to another digital address using a crypto wallet, as long as they have their private key, which unlocks their encrypted address. Owners store their private keys on devices, or even on paper or engraved in metal.

Why is Bitcoin decentralized?

Short answer: because all the transactions are public and verifiable by all the people that use Bitcoin, this makes double-spending and counterfeiting impossible.

If 97% of the public ledgers say that someone just made up a bunch of Bitcoin they are going to ignore the 3% that say those Bitcoins are legitimate. It keeps everyone involved honest, at least on the origins and ownership of the money.

When you make a historical comparison to other decentralized technologies and what they did to our world, bitcoin is undoubtedly the next biggest turn in human innovation.

Decentralized digital hard-sound money.

• Gutenberg’s Printing Press gave us decentralized analog knowledge (which separated Church and State)

• Democracy gave us decentralized government 

• The internet gave us decentralized digital knowledge

• Bitcoin gave us decentralized digital money (store of value) (which may one day separate Money and State)

What exactly decentralizes bitcoin? 

Mining. Mining decentralizes the currency issuance and clearing functions typically executed by a central bank and effectively replaces the need for banks entirely. Mining is a whole other topic in its own right that’s worth exploring which you can find here.

three of the most considerable differences between bitcoin and all other alt-coins as a global free market selected monetary good is that:

1. It is decentralized, controlled by the network of nodes and miners with 0 authority or need for intermediaries.

2. There was no pre-mining of coins before it was released to the public.

3. It benefited from an extremely rare set of circumstances. Because it launched in a world where digital cash had no established value, it circulated freely. That can’t be recaptured today since everyone expects ‘coins’ to have value post-bitcoin. Not only was it fair, but it was historically unique in its fairness. “The immaculate conception.”

Not only is bitcoin the most scarce asset on the planet, but it has become the most secure asset because of its attack, seizure, and censorship resistance.

“Bitcoin is effectively the most liquid, scarce, secure, and ultimately - the most unimpaired form of savings and personal property, known to humans.”

What was The orgin of bitcoin?