[Glossary](https://pecuvo.eu/en/glossary/) · Money and currencies # Bitcoin **In short:** Bitcoin is the first major cryptocurrency — a digital unit on a public blockchain, described in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper (31.10.2008) and running since 3 January 2009. **Simply put:** The idea is "money without a bank": all participants keep a shared "notebook" of transfers, and every block carries a fingerprint of the previous one, so old records are hard to falsify. There is no company, profit or property behind bitcoin — its price is market expectation, which is why it swings so much. Addresses are visible, so it is pseudonymous, not anonymous. **Example:** You buy bitcoin for a fictional €500. If the price falls by 30%, you have €350. If you lose your key, you lose that too — no one can restore it. **Watch out:** In 2014 the Mt. Gox exchange stopped and about 850,000 bitcoins disappeared: people lost because they had handed their keys to an intermediary. "Not your keys, not your coins." This is knowledge, not advice to buy. **Source:** Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (2008) — https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf · BIS, Annual Economic Report 2018, ch. V — https://www.bis.org/publications/aer-2018/cryptocurrencies-looking-beyond-hype ## In depth in the modules - [Module 5](https://pecuvo.eu/en/modules/crypto-and-tokenisation/) - [Module 1](https://pecuvo.eu/en/modules/history-of-money/) ## Related terms - [Cryptocurrency](https://pecuvo.eu/en/glossary/cryptocurrency/) - [Blockchain](https://pecuvo.eu/en/glossary/blockchain/) - [Speculation](https://pecuvo.eu/en/glossary/speculation/) - [Crypto scam](https://pecuvo.eu/en/glossary/crypto-scam/)