Nowadays, you can do just about anything with cryptocurrencies. We can buy products with them, use cryptos to make investments, transfer money, and even use them to play games on casino sites and claim offers such as the Vulkan Bet bonus. So, how much do you know about Bitcoin, the first and most well-known of these cryptocurrencies? Below, we share information about BTC that you probably do not know and will be surprised when you learn.

We Still Don’t Know Who Created It

If you research who created Bitcoin, you will see the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Everyone agrees that he was the first to develop BTC, hence cryptocurrencies. However, no one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Most people think it’s a nickname that represents a group of people, not a single person. Some have claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, but none have been able to prove it.

Nakamoto continued to be a part of Bitcoin’s development until December 2010 but then disappeared. Nobody heard from him since then. In some of his messages, he said that he was Japanese and lived in Japan, but this is considered a misconception as he uses UK English heavily. Gavin Andresen probably knows who he is, as Nakamoto handed over the source code of Bitcoin to him before he disappeared in 2010 and named him as the leader of the project, but Andresen has been living a kind of reclusive life since 2016. In any case, we still don’t know who (or which group) created Bitcoin.

20% Of All Existing Bitcoins Are Lost

Bitcoin was designed to have a certain limit to curb inflation: a maximum of 21 million coins can be mined, and once this number is reached, it will no longer be possible to create a new BTC. Currently, about 19.5 million coins are in circulation, so we’re pretty close to that limit. But what’s more interesting is that about 20% of all Bitcoins currently in existence are “inaccessible.” They’re technically considered lost, and this includes wallets that haven’t been accessed for a very long time.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the biggest culprit for the lost coins – whoever it is, he is quite wealthy because he has 1.1 million BTC. However, he did not use any since 2010 and did not access the wallet where these BTCs were stored. There are many reasons for the remaining lost amounts. Sometimes, BTC holders forget their passwords and cannot access their coins again because there is no such option as “password recovery.” Sometimes they die before they can tell anyone their passwords. In any case, the lost BTCs are estimated to be worth around $190 billion.

Yes, There Is Indeed Someone Who Bought Pizza With Bitcoin

You may have heard this story before. Нes, indeed, a man used BTC to order pizza and spent exactly 10,000 Bitcoins for it. This happened on May 22, 2010: Laszlo Hanyecz was craving pizza, but his favourite pizza chain refused to accept his offer to pay with Bitcoin. Hanyecz then posted a message on the Bitcointalk forum, saying that he would transfer 10,000 BTC to the person who brought two pizzas. Someone named Jeremy Sturdivant accepted this offer, bought two pizzas for 41 USD, delivered them to Hanyecz, and in return 10,000 BTC was transferred to his wallet.

This amount is currently valued at over $300 million. It was worth almost nothing in May 2010, but the value of BTC skyrocketed during the financial crisis that started in 2012. Currently, May 22 is celebrated as “Bitcoin Pizza Day” all over the world. What is not so well known about the story is that Hanyecz repeated the same thing ten times in the summer of 2010. He spent a total of over 100,000 BTC on pizza and sold all his remaining BTC for a vacation before the summer ended. Haynecz was the one who coded the first GPU miner and now has no regrets about what he did, as he says he never saw Bitcoin as an investment tool.

There Is a Country Where Bitcoin Is a Legal Tender

In almost any US, European, and Asian countries, Bitcoin is not considered legal tender. Some of these countries even expressly prohibit its use. Countries that do not do this do not have significant legal regulation (other than taxation) about Bitcoin. In any case, if you buy something or pay a debt with BTC, you are not making a “real transaction” that is protected by law. Because, according to current legal regulations, there is no difference between BTC and Monopoly money.

However, there are places where the situation is different. El Salvador is the first country to accept Bitcoin as a legal tender. Moreover, it offers a free digital wallet to all its citizens and adds 30 USD to the balance of anyone who agrees to use it. The World Bank has announced that it will no longer support the country once this system goes into effect (they claim that transparency in the economy will be lost), but El Salvador seems determined to put this plan into action.