Short History of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the premier cryptocurrency of the world. It is a peer-to-peer currency and transaction system based on a decentralized consensus-based public ledger called blockchain that records all transactions.

Now the bitcoin was envisaged in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto but it was a product of many decades of research into cryptography and blockchain and not just one guy’s work. It was the utopian dream of cryptographers and free trade advocates to have a borderless, decentralized currency based on the blockchain. Their dream is now a reality with the growing popularity of bitcoin and other altcoins around the world.

Now the cryptocurrency was first deployed over the consensus-based blockchain in 2009 and the same year it was traded for the very first time. In July 2010, the price of bitcoin was just 8 cents and the number of miners and nodes was quite less compared to tens of thousands in number right now.

Within the space of one year, the new alternative currency had risen to $1 and it was becoming an interesting prospect for the future. Mining was relatively easy and people were making good money making trades and even paying with it in some cases.

Within six months, the currency had doubled again to $2. While the price of bitcoin is not stable at a particular price point, it has been showing this pattern of insane growth for some time. In July 2011 at one point, the coin went bonkers and the record-high $31 price point was achieved but the market soon realized that it was overvalued compared to the gains made on the ground and it recorrected it back to $2.

December 2012 saw a healthy increase to $13 but soon enough, the price was going to explode. Within four months till April 2013, the price had increased to a whopping $266. It corrected itself later on back to $100 but this astronomical increase in price rose it stardom for the very first time and people started debating about an actual real-world scenario with Bitcoin.

It was around that time that I got acquainted with the new currency. I had my doubts but as I read more about it, the more it became clear that the currency was the future as it had no one to manipulate it or impose itself on it. Everything had to be done with complete consensus and that was what made it so strong and free.

So 2013 was the breakthrough year for the currency. Big companies began to publicly favor the acceptance of bitcoin and blockchain became a popular subject for Computer Science programs. Many people then thought that bitcoin had served its purpose and now it would settle down.

But, the currency became even more popular, with bitcoin ATMs being set up around the world and other competitors started flexing their muscles on different angles of the market. Ethereum developed the first programmable blockchain and Litecoin and Ripple started themselves as cheaper and faster alternatives to bitcoin.

The magical figure of $1000 was first breached in January 2017 and since then it has increased four times already till September. It is truly a remarkable achievement for a coin that was only worth 8 cents just seven years back.

Bitcoin even survived a hard fork on August 1, 2017, and has risen nearly 70% since then while even the fork bitcoin cash has managed to post some success. All of it is due to the appeal of the coin and stellar blockchain technology behind it.

While coventional economists argue that it is a bubble and the whole crypto world would collapse, it is just not so. There is no such bubble since it is an observable fact that it has, in fact, eaten away the shares of the fiat currencies and money transaction corporations.

The future is extremely bright for bitcoin and it is never too late to invest in it, both for short-term and long-term.