History of Bitcoin

DISCLAIMER

This article is a an extract from the original https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin and has not been checked for correctness or edited.

• Date: 25 September 2019
• Final reviews must be conducted by: 15 October 2019

Review: May need to be completely dumped Has anyone read Michael Hudson's new book? He's giving it away for free. Maybe we can incorporate it if it's well written.

Need to either remove references to or add in templates

History ends at 2012 (might need to copy more stuff across from 'what is bitcoin' page

History

2008

Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the the Bitcoin white paper on The Cryptography Mailing List at metzdowd.com (Satoshi's posts) describing the Bitcoin protocol.

2009

The Bitcoin network comes into existence on the 3rd of January with the release of the first Bitcoin client, wxBitcoin, and the issuance of the first Bitcoins. Satoshi includes a message in the first block via the coinbase transaction: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks".

2010

The first exchange rates for Bitcoin are set by individuals on the bitcointalk forums. In May, Laszlo Hanyecz purchases two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoin.

2012

BitPay reports having over 1000 merchants accepting Bitcoin under its payment processing service.

2014

“Silk Road”, a goods exchange platform which used Bitcoin for primarily criminal activity, is shut down completely. This is the first example of the Bitcoin public ledger being used in criminal prosecutions.

2017

Developers trying to introduce radical changes fork the Bitcoin network, conducting a social networking attack on investors, miners and exchanges to allow the newly created BTC airdrop to introduce changes that break the legal basis of Bitcoin's ownership traceability through Segregated Witness which removes digital signatures from Bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin is given the name Bitcoin Cash. In December, the price of Bitcoin reaches $4000 and BTC reaches almost $20,000 per coin giving the Bitcoins exchanged for pizzas in 2010 a value over $200 million.

2018

Bitcoin is again attacked by developers who attempt to limit scaling by enforcing blocksize limits and canonical transaction ordering requirements while simultaneously introducing opcodes that enable illegal activities to be anonymously validated by miners. The attacking developers conduct an organised campaign with exchanges to keep the Bitcoin Cash name and ticker for their airdrop while Bitcoin is given the name Bitcoin Satoshi Vision or BitcoinSV.

2020

In 2020, Bitcoin SV delivers the Genesis upgrade that reverts many changes to the original protocol, and removed all hard limits inserted by developers. This represents an exchange of power from developers to miners.