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
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the the Bitcoin white paper on The Cryptography Mailing List at metzdowd.com (Satoshi's posts) describing the Bitcoin protocol.
In 2009, the Bitcoin network came into existence on the 3rd of January with the release of the first Bitcoin client, wxBitcoin, and the issuance of the first Bitcoins. Satoshi included a message in the first block via the coinbase transaction: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks".
In 2010, the initial exchange rates for Bitcoin were set by individuals on the bitcointalk forums. In May, Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two pizzas with 10,000 bitcoins.
In 2012, BitPay reports of having over 1000 merchants accepting Bitcoin under its payment processing service.
In 2014, a criminal platform, “Silk Road”, which used Bitcoin was shut down completely. It showed that after all, Bitcoin is not a place for criminals.
In 2017, in order to be able to scale Bitcoin and avoid radical changes, Bitcoin is hard forked to Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core. In December, the price of Bitcoin reached almost $20,000 per bitcoin. The pizzas purchased in 2010 would be valued at $200 millions.
In 2018, in order to scale further and avoid unnecessary changes to the Bitcoin original protocol, Bitcoin Cash is hard forked again to Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision).
In 2020, Bitcoin SV delivered the Genesis upgrade that returned Bitcoin to its original protocol, and removed all the limits that were put on the protocol by developers. The power is handed over from developers to miners.