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So, today we will see all about Bitcoin's history, starting from its birth!
Yaa, you read it right, starting from its Birth.
Then why wait? Let's start :)
Bitcoin's early history
I think you might hear about 'Bitcoin (the protocol) has never been hacked, but they are wrong. Yes! Bitcoin has been hacked. In 2007 it's mentioned on a website that "A pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto began working on Bitcoin".
Now, let's see further details.
18 Aug 2008
The website bitcoin.org was registered using anomymousspeech.com, a broker that registers domains on behalf of customers who can choose to remain anonymous. This shows how important privacy was to the person or group involved in Bitcoin.
31 Oct 2008
This is the date when we can say Bitcoin launched officially. The Bitcoin whitepaper, written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, was released on an obscure but fascinating mailing list metzdowd.com that is much loved by cypherpunks. Wikipedia has this to say about cypherpunks.
3 Jan 2009
The genesis(first) block was mined. On this day, Bitcoin's blockchain has formed. At that moment, the first bitcoins, fifty of them, were created out of thin air and recorded into its blockchain(block zero). The transaction that contains the mining reward, the so-called 'coinbase' transaction, contains the text:
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
The text refers to a headline of the UK newspaper The Times.
Some interesting aside: The 50 BTC mined in the first block are unspendable. They sit in address, but the account holder, presumable Satoshi, whoever he, she, or they may be, is unable to transfer them to anyone else due to some quirk in the code.
9 Jan 2009
On this day, the version of 0.1 of the Bitcoin software was released by Satoshi Nakamoto, along with its source code. With the help of this, people can review the code, and download and run the software, so they can be both bookkeepers and miners. Bitcoin was thus accessible to anyone who wanted to download and use it.
12 Jan 2009
The first Bitcoin payment was made from Satoshi's address to Hal Finney's address in block 170, the first recorded movement of bitcoins. Hal Finney was a cryptographer, cypherpunk, and a coder, and some people believe he was partly behind the Satoshi pseudonym.
6 Feb 2010
It was kind of a historical day for Bitcoin. Because, the first Bitcoin exchange, "The Bitcoin Market," was created by bitcointalk.org forum user 'dwdollar'.
Previously, people traded bitcoins, but in a relatively unstructured way in chat rooms and messages boards.
22 May 2010
It's Pizza day for Bitcoin :) This was the first documented time bitcoins were used to pay for something in the real world. Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer in Florida, USA, offered to pay 10,000 BTC for a pizza on the bitcointalk forum.
I love Pizza btw, just kidding :)
17 Jul 2010
Jed McCaleb, (who has more recently founded Steller, a cryptocurrency platform based on Ripple), converted his card trading exchange into a Bitcoin trading exchange.
It's interesting, right?
Great!
Let's see some history more.
15 Aug 2010
It was kind of a black day for Bitcoin. On this day, Bitcoin's protocol got hacked. A potential vulnerability was discovered, and someone exploited this vulnerability in block 74,638 to create 184 billion bitcoins for themselves. This strange transaction was quickly discovered and, with the consent of the majority of the community, the whole blockchain was 'forked', reverting it to a previous state.
If anyone says, Bitcoin hasn't even been hacked, ask them "What about the integer overflow bug in August 2010 where someone sent themself 184 billion bitcoins?"
18 Sep 2010
The first mining pool, Slush's pool, lined its first block. A mining pool is an organization where multiple participants combine their hash power to give themself a better chance of winning a block. The participants split the reward between them in proportion to their hash power contributions.
7 Jan 2011
12 BTC were exchanged for $300,000,000,000,000. This is probably the highest exchange rate between Bitcoin even achieved. However, these dollars were Zimbabwean dollars.
9 Feb 2011
On this day, Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar i.e. 1 BTC = 1 USD.
7 Apr 2011
VirWox, a website that allowed customers to convert between fiat currencies and Linden Dollars(the virtual currency for use within the computer game), integrated Bitcoin. People could now exchange directly between bitcoins and Liden Dollars. This is possibly the first virtual currency to virtual currency exchange.
1 Jun 2011
WIRED magazine published a famous article, "Underground website lets you buy any drug imaginable", written by Adrian Chen. It described a website called The Silk Road, launched in Feb 2011 and run by twenty-seven-year-old Ross William Ulbricht under the nickname "Dread Pirate Roberts". The Silk Road was described as a kind of eBay for drugs.
20 Jun 2011
Possibly the first documented evidence of a physical brick-and-mortar merchant accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment. Room 77, a restaurant based in Berlin, Germany sold fast food for bitcoins.
2 Sep 2011
Mike Caldwell started creating physical bitcoins which he called Casacius coins. They are physical discs of metal, each with a unique private key embedded behind a hologram sticker. Each coin's private key is linked to an address that is funded with a specified amount of bitcoins., as depicted on the coins.
8 May 2012
Satoshi Dice was a gambling website launched on 24 April 2012. Users could send bitcoins to specific addresses with a chance of winning up to 64,000 times their original stake. Each address had a different payout and a different chance f winning. On 8 May, it became responsible for over half of the transaction volume in the Bitcoin blockchain.
28 Nov 2012
Bitcoin's first block reward halving day: On block 210,000 the block reward from 50 BTC to 25 BTC, slowing the rate of generation of bitcoins. Transaction fees then were insignificant, so this halving day reduced y half of each block's financial reward for miners.
2 May 2013
The first two-way Bitcoin ATM was launched in San Diego, California. This was a machine where you could buy bitcoins or sell your bitcoins for cash. This sparked a wave of one-way Bitcoin ending machines and two-way Bitcoin ATMs being installed around the world.
Jul 2013
This month, the first Bitcoin ETF(Exchange Traded Fund) proposal was filed with the United States of Securities and Exchange Commission. An ETF could make an investment into Bitcoin more accessible to the public as many funds are allowed to buy ETFs but not bitcoins directly.
6 Aug 2013
Bitcoin was classified as a currency by a judge in Texas, USA. his was one of many arguments and determination of heat Bitcoin is: Currency? Property? A Security? Some other financial Assets? A New Thing? There is still no global definition, and there may never be a globally consistent one.
9 Aug 2013
Bitcoin's price became searchable through Bloomberg software, which is popular with traders in traditional financial markets. Bloomberg used the ticker 'XBT' to represent Bitcoin, consistent with I currency code standards.
20 Aug 2013
Bitcoin was ruled private money in Germany, with tax exemption if held for more than a year. The tax treatment of bitcoins and cryptocurrency is a major point of contention, especially in the US where the buying ad selling of bitcoins attracts capital gains.
22 Nov 2013
Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Galactic, announced he would accept bitcoins as payment for a flight t space. Bitcoins and space travel - what a great time to be alive.
Here, we have reached the end of the history of Bitcoin
I know you found it interesting :)
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That's my job.
Again, thanks for reading this out. See you with a new article.
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