Bitcoin until today
Core Technology Discoveries
Bitcoin was developed over the decade preceding its release and melds numerous technologies that were well established in the computing and cryptography industries.
- Merkle Trees which Bitcoin uses as a means to immutably condense the record of a block of unbounded size into just 32 bytes were patented by Ralph Merkle in 1979.
- The use of elliptic curves in cryptography was suggested independently by both Neal Koblitz and Victor S. Miller in 1985. The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm which builds on this technology to enable signing of messages using ECC keypairs and is used heavily in Bitcoin.
- Forth is a programming language created by Charles H. Moore in the late 1960's. The scripting language used to build Bitcoin transactions is based heavily on Forth.
Digital Cash systems pre-Bitcoin
eCash
A cryptographic system for untraceable payments was first described by David Chaum in 1982 in the paper "Blind signatures for untraceable payments, Advances in Cryptology - Crypto '82, Springer-Verlag (1983), 199–203. In 1990 Chaum extended this system to create the first cryptographic anonymous electronic cash system which became known as Ecash.
b-money and Bit Gold
In 1998 Wei Dai published a description of an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system which he called "b-money". Around the same time, Nick Szabo created bit gold. Like Bitcoin, Bit gold was a currency system where users would compete to solve a proof of work function, with solutions being cryptographically chained together and published via a distributed property title registry. A variant of Bit gold, called Reusable Proofs of Work, was implemented by Hal Finney.
Liberty Reserve
Liberty Reserve was a centralized digital currency service that allowed users to register and transfer money to other users with only a name, e-mail address, and birth date. The site was siezed by US authorities in a co-operative operation across 17 countries after it was discovered to be facilitating money laundering activities.
Release of the Bitcoin whitepaper
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper titled "Bitcoin: a peer to peer electronic cash system" on The Cryptography Mailing list at metzdowd.com describing the Bitcoin system.
Establishment of the Bitcoin Network
The Bitcoin network came into existence on 3 January 2009 with the release of the first Bitcoin client, wxBitcoin, and the distribution of the first bitcoins. A year after, the initial exchange rates for bitcoin were set by individuals on the bitcointalk forums.
The first significant transaction involved the exchange of 10,000 BTC from Laszlo Hanyecz for “a couple of pizzas” supplied by Jeremy Sturdivant. The record of this transaction can be found here]
In 2011, Wikileaks, Freenet, Singularity Institute, Internet Archive, Free Software Foundation and others began to accept donations in bitcoin.
In 2012, BitPay reports of having over 1000 merchants accepting bitcoin under its payment processing service.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
https://wiki.bitcoinsv.io/index.php/History_of_Bitcoin