Bitcoin is the first digital currency based on blockchain. It solved the double-spending problem and enabled peer-to-peer transactions on a large scale. Bitcoin was designed to work as a trustless digital currency that would function without government oversight or a central bank.
Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity has never been confirmed and has become the subject of great intrigue. Bitcoin builds upon on other cryptographic and digital currency projects that came before it, but its use of blockchain made it more viable. Nakamoto originally released his white paper and open-source software on a cryptography forum. He mined the first block of the Bitcoin chain, called the genesis block in January 2009.
Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. One of the core innovations of Bitcoin, is its consensus algorithm, which creates an incentive system that rewards miners for confirming transactions.
Hal Finney, who developed the first reusable proof-of-work system (RPOW), several years before, was the first Bitcoin adopter and received the first bitcoin transaction ever recorded on its blockchain.

Vertcoin is a cryptocurrency with a strong emphasis on keeping the ecosystem as decentralized as possible. Vertcoin was designed with the goal of being easily mined by all users and to resist the centralizing tendency of specialized mining operations. Vertcoin has a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism that is ASIC resistant, and uses the Lyra2RE mining algorithm.