In simple words bitcoin is not licensed and does not need a license. It has anonymous features and it is not under the governments regulations. It operates without the government and exists Not for the government. It is therefore does not need a patent or a copyright or any licenses sice it operates outside the umbrella of the government.
Nono. Bitcoin is licensed under the MIT license, that is to help others developers so they wont have a legal problems, also because someone could usurp it for himself saying he is the author and create non-open source license. The rest of what you say is practically correct.
The thing i am searching for is whether the bitcoin as a medium of exchange is part of the original work or not. Satoshi Nakamoto released the first version of Bitcoin under the MIT License.
Because of that, all software created that uses any of that code, is automatically opensource.
Today, Bitcoin's updated and evolved code is still under that original MIT License and also this
license notice found on the Bitcoin Core Github:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/COPYINGThe bitcoin that Satoshi created, IMO, is the same as the bitcoin circulating today.
For example, if all bitcoins mined in 2009 are still movable and allowable by today's version of the code,
then the bitcoins as a medium of exchange is still the same. If later we need to exchange all those coins
for new coins (like a proof of burn) then I would then say that the bitcoins of the past are not the bitcoins of today.
(Though under certain circumstances, it could still be argued to be the same License.)
For example, Litecoin was a fork of Bitcoin, with the Satoshi license. In theory, since Satoshi released
Bitcoin as opensource and since Litecoin forked that code, Litecoin is now opensource, but no one would
argue that litecoins of today are the same medium of exchange of the bitcoins of the past. That is a new medium.
IMO, the issues is whether the new Bitcoin code of today, allows for the past bitcoins to still be valid in the present.
I think that it does, and as such, the bitcoins of the past are still the same bitcoins of today, even if the original code
has evolved and been added to.