Recently, the Guinness World Records added Bitcoin (BTC) and other blockchain assets to its latest record book edition. These assets were featured in the category, Cryptomania.
The inclusion of cryptocurrency in a global annual award like the Guinness World Records suggests that digital assets and blockchain have been among the most widely discussed topics in recent years.
The 2023 version, released last month, contained several major crypto milestones, including crypto adoption, NFTs, fan tokens, and Bitcoin. Also, the body recognized Bitcoin as the most valuable crypto with a market capitalization of over $816.69 billion as of March 24th, 2022. In addition, Bitcoin gained recognition as the first decentralized cryptocurrency in the world after its launch in 2009.
According to Guinness World Records’ website description, Bitcoin was created as a tool to solve the problem of regulating digital currencies without a third party or centralized organization overseeing the transactions. Moreover, the publication noted that other attempts were made before the emergence of Bitcoin, but they relied on a third party.
Satoshi Nakamoto first released a white paper describing Bitcoin on August 18th, 2008. However, there is still huge uncertainty over who Satoshi Nakamoto is.
While some analysts argue that the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” is not a name of a person but a group of persons, others believe it is one person.
On January 3rd, 2009, Nakamoto mined Bitcoin’s first block on the network, completing the working mechanism of the concept. However, it was until January 9th before Nakamoto made the open-source client public.
Earlier attempts at creating something like BTC used cryptographic techniques for user identification and log transactions. However, they still needed a third party to authorize transactions.
The aim was to ensure that individuals do not spend the same currency more than once – double-spending. On the Bitcoin blockchain, the PoW (Proof-of-Work) consensus mechanism helps to validate transactions.
Each computer (node) signifies a validator, also called a miner. Once a transaction is sent to the blockchain, the miners help validate it and add it to a block when 51% of the miner’s community approves it.
The Bitcoin blockchain solves the issue of double spending using a “trustless” system that does not rely on a third party to validate transactions. This trustless system is made up of miners or validators.
Validators are computers devoted to the network to verify all transactions and prevent malicious actors. Users generate cryptographically safe transactions that are relayed to the community of miners.
Miners collect as many trades as they can accommodate into a block. Afterward, they conduct a mathematical procedure to validate the block and add it to the chain of previous blocks. Usually, miners are rewarded in BTC for supplying computational power to the network.
