Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer protocol for a decentralized digital currency that was anonymously published in 2009 and incentivizes economic security of the system through mining. It allows for global cryptographically-secure transactions without intermediaries by having users pay small fees per transaction while miners secure the network by validating transactions and creating new blocks for rewards. A bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal places and specialized mining hardware uses ASIC chips to powerfully mine new bitcoins.