Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency which was released in 2009 by a programmer nick named Satoshi Nakamoto. It started a major trend in which programmers came up with and coded out cryptocurrencies that differed by more than logo and name. As far as I know Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Etherium were the first major crytocurrencies that existed, before Monero. Cryptocurrencies existed in the 90’s as per newspaper articles online attest and I can say that I personally understand why it existed before today, because they were easy to monetize, but were not catching on. Why did Bitcoin catch on? I think it was because it had many followers out of the gate. I personally earned more than 10,000 dollars in cash from Bitcoin trades in a few months. I would like to note one sale I did in two and a half months after I purchased 4000 dollars of Bitcoin. I sold it for over 12,000 dollars and purchased a 2500 dollar Macbook. It was my first Macbook I bought for 1800 dollars in Bitcoin from a guy that wanted to give it to his girlfriend, but they ended up breaking it off.
Bitcoin is programmed as software that keeps track of the public ledger. The public ledger is a software database that keeps track of all Bitcoin transactions on the Bitcoin network, by giving each user with a wallet an ID and each transaction an ID with an amount transferred. Each transaction costs a miniscule amount of Bitcoin and gets approved within minutes to a few hours, depending on the network congestion to the amount of miners in the whole network factor. Miners work by employing computational devices that are developed to mine Bitcoin, which means to verify transactions to be rewarded new Bitcoin, which they share equally by hashing (computational) power each user contributes to the mining pool. Mining pools are organizations that network these machines to combine their hashing power to get faster results in mining blocks. Blocks contain an amount of Bitcoin. Wallets are hashing algorithm best friends that get rewarded after they solve the calculations. Wallets are web based or desktop based and send and receive Bitcoin as well as store it in an accessible and fungible manenr, which means you can use it almost like an online banking account where you send Bitcoin to any address. Addresses are stored on the ledger and are associated with a particular wallet. Cold storage wallets are hardware that run a software wallet and are used to keep track of Bitcoin transactions when connected to the internet through a PC.