About Bitcoin
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009, and runs on a proof-of-work blockchain with a supply capped at 21 million coins. New coins enter circulation through mining, and the issuance rate halves roughly every four years.
Changing Bitcoin’s rules
Bitcoin was built to answer one question. How do you send a payment straight to another person, with no bank or payment company in between? The obstacle is double spending. A digital coin is a file, and a file can be copied. The 2008 paper that described Bitcoin framed its whole design around solving that without a trusted third party, and the rest of the system follows from it.
Nobody owns the network. Anyone can propose a rule, published in the open as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, and nobody has to adopt it. A proposal becomes a rule only when enough of the people running the network decide, separately and voluntarily, to run software that contains it. Bitcoin’s own documentation draws the comparison with email: there is no company to write to and no board to petition. That is why the supply schedule has held. Not because it cannot be changed, but because changing it would need almost everyone to agree at once.
The trade-off shows in what the base layer can do. Blocks are limited in size and arrive on average every ten minutes, so the number of transactions the network settles each second is set by those limits and not by demand. When demand rises, the cost of getting into a block rises with it. The newly created coins paid to miners shrink towards nothing by design, and transaction fees are meant to take over as the reason to keep securing the network.
Longer read: How Bitcoin's rules are changed, and who can change them. Bitcoin has no owner and no committee that can issue an instruction. This guide explains the proposal process, the difference between a soft fork and a hard fork, and how a disputed change was settled in practice.
See more prices on the crypto in AUD hub, and how this figure is struck on the methodology page.