Bitcoin’s ten-year celebration
Ten years ago a white paper (1) was created for a decentralized cryptocurrency, which brought about a gold rush of this age. Individual miners became large companies, and altogether the Bitcoin network now has more computing power than Google! (2)
The white paper and implementation of the bitcoin network by Satoshi Nakamoto(3) gave an opportunity for people to self manage their finances. Pay each other directly with electronic cash without going through a financial institution. Let’s take a look at the beginning stages of Bitcoin and consider when it was exactly Bitcoin’s birthday.
When exactly is it Bitcoin’s Birthday?
Bitcoin’ birthday is a little subjective. You have two options. You could choose to see either the whitepaper release as its birthday or the day that Satoshi mined the first Genesis Block. A poll done by Prasos’ CEO on Twitter last Oktober(4), was set up to find get a public opinion. Around 74% of people of 799 participants reacted that Bitcoin’s birthday should be the mining of the Genesis block on the 3rd of January 2009.
Beginning stages of Bitcoin’s history
- On 18 August 2008, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered.
- Later that year on 31 October, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list.
- On the 3rd of January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of bitcoin (block number 0). It had a reward of 50 bitcoins. These were not spendable. Hall Finney received ten bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world’s first bitcoin transaction on 12 January 2009.
- On the 6th of August,2010 the only major security flaw in bitcoin’s history was spotted.
- On August 15th the flaw was exploited, which resulted in the first bitcoin fork. This flaw was the only major security issue found in bitcoin’s history.
- Based on bitcoin’s open source code, other cryptocurrencies started to emerge in 2011 (5)
Now that we have taken a short look into Bitcoin’s history, let’s also take a glimpse into the future of Bitcoin and see which elements promote or work against the mass adoption of Bitcoin.
1 “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System – Bitcoin.org.” https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.
2“Bitcoin is Bigger than Google – Muneeb Ali – Medium.” 19 Apr. 2015, https://medium.com/@muneeb/bitcoin-is-bigger-than-google-ec84310296d9. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.
3“Satoshi Nakamoto – Wikipedia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.
4 “Henry Brade on Twitter: “Which one is the more significant/relevant ….” 31 Oct. 2018, https://twitter.com/technom4ge/status/1057594279462428672. Accessed 23 Jan. 2019.
5 “History of bitcoin – Wikipedia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.