In 2008, a secretive inventor—or group of inventors—named Satoshi Nakamoto created the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain (or alt-chain) technology. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger system in which transactions are recorded but cannot be copied. This methodology that remedies many of the drawbacks of traditional internet networks as a blockchain is essentially a self-auditing ecosystem that reconciles transactions every ten minutes in groups known as blocks.