Bitcoin changed the landscape of digital money when it was introduced to the world in 2009, and was followed by many other types of cryptocurrencies. Now bitcoin and the over 800 copycats (so called altcoins) have reached a very large market valuation of $110 billion. Let’s take a look at how this emerging digital assets landscape began and where we are today.The Pre-Bitcoin Era and Satoshi’s Gift
Since the beginning of the Internet’s early days, the concept of digital money has always intrigued the human race. When the world wide web really started to become popularized during the late eighties, and throughout the nineties, online privacy activists called cypherpunks began creating and envisioning digital currencies. David Chaum and many other well-known cryptographers helped pave the way for a technology like bitcoin.
One of the first digital currencies was Digicash, created by Chaum, and was later sold and used for bank-to-bank settlements only. There were many other efforts during those years that tried to create the perfect Internet currency such as Hashcash, e-gold, and Bitgold. However these ideas never really caught on until an anonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto revealed his white paper called ‘Bitcoin’ in 2008. The following year in January the Bitcoin network was born while the central banking system was once again quantitatively easing the world away from economic failure.
https://news.bitcoin.com/digital-money-exploded-bitcoin/
