What are Virgin Bitcoin?

Key Takeaways

  • Virgin Bitcoins are newly mined.
  • They have no transaction history.
  • They ensure no prior use in illegal activities.

Virgin Bitcoins are bitcoins that have never been spent. This means they are purchased directly from miners who mined the bitcoin directly.


Table Of Contents

Why Are They Called ‘Virgin’?

Why are virgin bitcoins called virgin? Because a miner mined the coin directly, so it’s impossible for that specific coin to have been used for anything illegal since it was distributed to the miner directly as a block reward.

Now, whether that is an issue is up for debate.

An Example

Think about it like this:

The dollar bills in your wallet may have been used for many things, but that doesn’t affect your ability to use the dollars to spend at any store.

So too, with Bitcoin, there are two sides:

  • Virgin bitcoins are better because it’s guaranteed that they were never used for anything illegal.
  • Virgin bitcoins don’t matter because users don’t care about the history of the bitcoin they are receiving.

Why It’s Different

The main difference with Bitcoin is that the history of a bitcoin can actually be somewhat tracked. While with a dollar bill or other cash, there’s no way to know where the cash was or what is has been used for.