A digital coin contains the public key of its owner. To transfer it, the owner signs the coin together with the public key of the next owner. Anyone can check the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.
"[...] a concerted and state-sanctioned attempt to kill it never materialized. [...] no-one wanted to set a legal precedent of censoring general purpose technology simply because of one set of legally problematic uses." —Simon Morris
⬆️Fees for inclusion in the next block are up 85% over the average in the past 2016 blocks. ⬆️ I'm betting that before this epoch ends we'll see some lower fees. The average over this halving (193,785 blocks) has been 30 sats/vByte. #increasingfees -- Current min fee: 276 sats/vByte vs 149 average over the past 2016 blocks.