What is Bitcoin

A type of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is a digital currency created in January 2009 following the housing market crash. Bitcoin offers the promise of lower transaction fees than traditional online payment mechanisms and is operated by a decentralised authority, unlike government-issued currencies. There are no physical bitcoins, only balances kept on a public ledger that everyone has transparent access to, that – along with all Bitcoin transactions – is verified by a massive amount of computing power. Balances of Bitcoin tokens are kept using public and private "keys," which are long strings of numbers and letters linked through the mathematical encryption