Bitcoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world right now. It’s a virtual currency designed to work as an exchange medium. Instead of relying on central authorities, Bitcoin is all about harnessing the power of cryptography to bring you a simple way to acquire, share and manage your coins the way you want. There are a lot of cypherpunk ideas brought to Bitcoin.
Before the creation of Bitcoin, there were numerous digital cash technologies already. You had hashcash that focused on things like spam control. There were also things like bit gold that were the precursors of digital currencies you can use and enjoy at this time. That being said, the first time we heard about bitcoin was in 2008.
That’s when the domain name Bitcoin.org was registered and on the 31st of October that year a paper named Bitcoin: A peer to peer Electronic Cash System was published by Satoshi Nakamoto. This was just a moniker, even today the true creator of Bitcoin isn’t known and he decided to remain anonymous.
The paper in question was the one that shared details about a peer to peer network that would generate a system for creating electronic transactions without having to worry about issues like trust or anything in between. It’s one of the more creative ideas and something that constantly pushes the boundaries to deliver something unique and also very different at the same time.
Also, the first open source client for Bitcoin was released in January 2009 and it was hosted on Sourceforge. The first transaction was performed by Hal Finney, which actually received 10 Bitcoins from Nakamoto. It’s said that during the early days, Nakamoto mined roughly a million bitcoins on his own. But before he went away and never touched the project, it seems that he handled the project to Gavin Andersen, who then became the lead at the Bitcoin Foundation.
An interesting thing is that one of the massive transactions in the beginning was around 10000 BTC, and that was to buy 2 pizzas from Papa John’s. Soon after that, Bitcoin started to become public, with more and more companies starting to become interested in it. In 2013 for example we had Coinbase selling $1 million worth of bitcoins in a single month. The Internet Archive and many other businesses started to access donations or even payments with bitcoin. It was a great turning point at that time, and something that really showed the value provided by this.
2017 is when Bitcoin really boomed, to the point where a bitcoin ended up getting from $1000 to around $16000 in a single year. Of course, the value has dropped, but it stays at roughly $6000-$8000. This clearly shows that virtual coins have value, and the Bitcoin system is indeed one of the best and most popular ones on the market. This is one of the most incredible cryptocurrencies and certainly the one that managed to impress people with its tremendous capabilities and unique features!