Decentralized: No one controls or owns the Bitcoin network; it has no CEO. Rather, the network consists of voluntary participants who agree to the rules of the protocol (which takes the form of an open-source software client). Changes to the protocol must be made by consensus of its users, and there are a huge number of participants, including “nodes,” end users, developers, miners, and participants in related industries such as exchanges, wallet providers, and storage providers. This makes Bitcoin a quasi-political system.
Distributed: All bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public registry called a blockchain. The network relies on people who voluntarily keep copies of the registry and run the Bitcoin protocol software. These “nodes” facilitate the correct transactions by following the protocol rules defined by the software. There are currently more than 80,000 nodes distributed around the world, making it virtually impossible for the network to downtime or lose information.
Transparent: The addition of new transactions to the blockchain registry and the state of the Bitcoin network at any given time (in other words, the “truth”) is achieved by consensus in a transparent way, according to the rules of the protocol.
Peer-to-peer: Even though the nodes transmit the state of the network (“truth”), payments actually go directly from one person or enterprise to another. This means that there is no need for an intermediary in the form of any “trusted third party”.
No permissions are needed: anyone can use the Bitcoin network, there are no “gatekeepers” and no need to create a “Bitcoin account. Any transactions that comply with the rules of the protocol will be validated by the network according to certain consensus mechanisms.
Pseudo-anonymous. Identity information is not essentially tied to bitcoin transactions. Instead, transactions are tied to addresses that take the form of randomly generated alphanumeric strings.
Resistant to censorship: because all bitcoin transactions that comply with the rules of the protocol are valid, because the transactions are pseudo-anonymous, and because users themselves have the ‘keys’ to their bitcoin assets, it is difficult for government agencies to prohibit people from using Bitcoin or accessing users’ assets. This is important for freedom and democracy.
Publicly accessible: All transactions on the Bitcoin network are recorded and are publicly accessible. While this virtually eliminates the possibility of fraud, it also makes it possible in some cases to deductively link individuals to specific Bitcoin addresses.