As most people know Bitcoin operates on a public ledger that can be accessed by everyone. This is the reason why you can look how much is in a particular wallet and which transaction occured when. This also means that you can trace every Bitcoin all the way back to it's origin. You can see haw many hands it has already passed and when it was mined by who. That doesn't mean that you know exactly which person mined it because you never know who owns a wallet but it is a lot more transparent than the traditional money system.
How does it work in practice?
In theory you could look in the api, the code working in the background but there is a much easier user friendly way to research such questions. The website https://blockchain.info/ provides a very easy to use frontend user interface. It offers a wide variety of information. If you want to look at the history of one particular wallet you can type the adress in the search bar and you can take a look at the current balance or the total amount received or any other information you could think of. Another interesting thing to look up are the recently mined blocks where you can see exactly when it was mined with which difficulty and how much time it took to mine the block.
If you want to similar statistics and facts for Ethereum there is a site called https://etherscan.io that allows you to do so.
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Take a look at our previous article about the blockchain:
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrencies/@cryptoinvesthub/crypto-basics-what-is-the-blockchain