Bitcoin (BTC) Price, Real-time Quote & News

Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown person published a white paper under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation. From 2021 to 2025, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender currency before revoking it. As bitcoin is pseudonymous, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to its ban by several countries. Bitcoin works through the collaboration of computers, each of which acts as a node in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Each node maintains an independent copy of a public distributed ledger of transactions, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Transactions are validated through the use of cryptography, preventing one person from spending another person's bitcoin, as long as the owner of the bitcoin keeps certain sensitive data secret. Consensus between nodes about the content of the blockchain is achieved using a computationally intensive process based on proof of work, called mining, which is performed by purpose-built computers. Wikipedia

About South African Rand

The South African rand, or simply the rand, is the official currency of South Africa. It is subdivided into 100 cents, and a comma separates the rand and cents. The South African rand is legal tender in the Common Monetary Area member states of Namibia, Lesotho, and Eswatini, with these three countries also having national currencies pegged with the rand at parity and still widely accepted as substitutes. The rand was also legal tender in Botswana until 1976, when the pula replaced the rand at par. The rand is legal tender in Zimbabwe as part of its multiple currency system, which also includes other currencies such as the euro, the pound sterling, the US dollar, and the Zimbabwean ZiG. Wikipedia