Bitcoin: Economics, Technology, and Governance

摘要

Bitcoin is an online communication protocol that facilitates the use of a virtual currency, including electronic payments. Since its inception in 2009 by an anonymous group of developers (Nakamoto 2008), Bitcoin has served approximately 62.5 million transactions between 109 million accounts. As of March 2015, the daily transaction volume was approximately 200,000 bitcoins-roughly $50 million at market exchange rates-and the total market value of all bitcoins in circulation was $3.5 billion (Blockchain.info 2015). Table 1 summarizes Bitcoin activity to date. (We will follow the convention in the computer science literature of using capital-B Bitcoin to refer to the system, and lower-b bitcoin to refer to the unit of account.)