Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Bitcoin was created by a person or group of people going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2008 they released the whitepaper – Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System – on a cryptography mailing list.

After launching the Network, Satoshi continued to work on Bitcoin for a couple of years before disappearing and leaving Bitcoin to continue as an open source project with no single authority figure.

Bitcoin are issued through a process called mining. Mining computers perform the dual functions of securing the network and ordering and commiting new transactions to the blockchain. When a miner is successful in mining a new block, they are rewarded with the fees of all transactions included in that block. They also receive "new" bitcoin, called the block subsidy.

The block subsidy is the only way new bitcoin are able to be produced, and the rate at which they are produced reduces over time, until the point that 21 million bitcoin exist. The reduction in block subsidy is known as The Halving.