A quick guide to Bitcoin History, this is based on my research and might have some mistakes. Feel free to point out any mistake.
What is Bitcoin?
Introduction
Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency to exist and currently the most valuable one. The first and official appearance of the term was in 2008, it's a white paper that showed up on a list, written a person named
Satoshi Nakamoto (real identity unknown to this day). The paper explained a method peer-to-peer where people can realize transactions using blockchain technology, in a way is safe, automatically and it doesn't demand trust. Before the release, Bitcoin is known to be a product made and maintained by a group of very dedicated scientists, and it has been on research and being built for decades now. After Bitcoin release, many other cryptocurrencies were born afterward.
How Bitcoin works?
Blockchain
Bitcoin is blockchain. And blockchain is a technology that has a decentralization as a measure of security. It's an ever-growing list of transactions records, known as
"block"[/i], such blocks hold crucial info and transaction information from the previous block, which is chained with another block before him. Thus the name
blockchain. Resuming the system, such blocks are managed by a peer-to-peer system, which every computer connected has the task to validate and connect each block (each transaction). Being secure by design, nobody can really modify the chain of information. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires collusion of the network majority. Thousands of independent computers are taking care of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
This way, Bitcoin is basically fraud-proof and can be used effectively as a decentralized currency system.Pre-History
Other digital currencies and first evidences
It is known that Bitcoin is not the first "digital money" to ever exist. There were several other forms of transactions before the most trustable and safe cryptocurrency come to exist, E-Gold was a very famous service back in the day and was eventually shut-down by the US government for money laundering and being unlicensed. There were other services with similar experiences like Gold Money and e-Bullion, the latter ended up being another scam and stole millions of dollars from victims, the owner was eventually arrested for several crimes. As far as I researched most of them were shut-down or are really not that strong anymore, reasons: being a big target for hackers and not secure of all, resulting in a lot of headaches for investors and users.
After the disaster, it's very unknown what exactly the so-called Satoshi Nakamoto and the group were doing before 2008, there were many technologies like blockchain that could be discussed and found on the internet that probably helped them developing Bitcoin, some of the currency predecessors were B-money by Wei Dai and Bit Gold by Nick Szabo (what a lot of people assume it's the real Satoshi) , the very concept of digital money itself was very trendy amongst tech people from the 80s and 90s at the rise of personal computer and internet and the peak of cyber punk culture, the technology itself was used on some old technology released in the late 90's, as long people don't discover who Satoshi Nakamoto is, such events are most likely to remain unknown, at least for the great public.
2008
Monetary Revolution
Honestly, most people didn't care much about cryptocurrency at the beginning. With several failures and scams before it, "Digital Gold" was far from being popular due to scandals and scams that had recently happened, but the world was in crisis and even Wall Street was suffering from great public outrage when it started it was not even 10 cents, and it stayed like that for several months until the first rise in 2009. Few people understood what it really was and "Satoshi Nakamoto" kept working, buying domains and developing the currency.
We can still access Satoshi's post that reveals cryptocurrency to the world:
http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.htmlSo, Satoshi releases the Whitepaper and continues on to register the project with SourceForge (which is an open-source community collaboration website, similar to GitHub. As of June 2015 the project has completely been transferred to GitHub.)
2009
First actual year
The first 50 blockchains were released on 3rd January and didn't even worth 10 cents.The first transaction was made by Satoshi Nakamoto. On December 16 the second version on Bitcoin was already being released with several patches and crucial features, later a huge problem would be found. Mining was still low as few people were connected with the database, as far as I know, the year ended with Bitcoin not even worth 30 cents. No alt-coins existed at that time. An IRC channel was released, Bitcoin kept a low profile, not a surprise after the several cases and the US government cracking down on "digital money".
2010
The pot is brewing
The first official Bitcoin market stock was open!
And someone bought pizza with 10.000 BTC! With ever increasing publicity we can say the oldest user base of cryptocurrency users was alive, which nowadays are probably all rich. Many advances were made in 2010, wallets, transactions, bugs were fixed, capitalization value of bitcoin reaches it's first million dollars. The first mobile transaction was made, by January 30 Bitcoin reaches 30 cents value! And the first miner was released,
the legendary OpenCL miner! By now, 100$ invested in 2010 worth roughly 18 million in 2018 or more.
2011
A solid year
From this point I will just provide quick annotations. Since so much starts to happen and it's quite difficult to make it "fast" by explaining.
Bitcoin price hits 1 dollar in February! But that's still not the launching year, by the end of 2011 the peak will not even be 5 dollars.
Extraordinary fact: 4BTC were sold for 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars, this country money history is very crazy!Bitcoin is finally exchanged for crude fiat money!
"Britain launches the first exchange to trade bitcoin and British Pound Sterling (GBP). Just days later, on March 31, Bitcoin Brazil opens a service for face-to-face exchange in Brazilian Reals (BRL) and U.S. Dollars." from 99bitcoins.
Mt. Gov is open for business as just in 2 years BTC is already face-to-face with dollars.
Mt. Gov is hacked! Hackers steal employee credentials and sell fake bitcoins until the same reach the 0.01 price, later on, they manage to reverse the damage.
Under construction...
