Etymology and orthography

The word bitcoin occurred in the white paper that defined bitcoin published in 2008. It is a compound of the words bit and coin.[38] The white paper frequently uses the shorter coin.[39]

There is no uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization. Some sources use Bitcoin, capitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoin, lowercase, to refer to the unit of account.[40] The Wall Street Journal,[41] The Chronicle of Higher Education,[42] and the Oxford English Dictionary[38] advocate use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases. This article follows the latter convention.