Elon Musk talks Crypto：The Word of Bitcoin

Based on a free market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown person. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation.]: ch. 1  In 2021, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. Bitcoin is currently used more as a store of value and less as a medium of exchange or unit of account. It is mostly seen as an investment and has been described by many scholars as an economic bubble. As bitcoin is pseudonymous, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to its ban by several countries as of 2021.

History

Main article: History of bitcoin

Background

Before bitcoin, several digital cash technologies were released, starting with David Chaum's ecash in the 1980s. The idea that solutions to computational puzzles could have some value was first proposed by cryptographers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in 1992. The concept was independently rediscovered by Adam Back who developed Hashcash, a proof-of-work scheme for spam control in 1997. The first proposals for distributed digital scarcity-based cryptocurrencies came from cypherpunks Wei Dai (b-money) and Nick Szabo (bit gold) in 1998. In 2004, Hal Finney developed the first currency based on reusable proof of work.These various attempts were not successful: Chaum's concept required centralized control and no banks wanted to sign on, Hashcash had no protection against double-spending, while b-money and bit gold were not resistant to Sybil attacks.

2008–2009: Creation

External image

image icon Cover page of The Times 3 January 2009 showing the headline used in the genesis block

Bitcoin logos made by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 (left) and 2010 (right) depict bitcoins as gold tokens.

The domain name bitcoin.org was registered on 18 August 2008.[14] On 31 October 2008, a link to a white paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list.[15] Nakamoto implemented the bitcoin software as open-source code and released it in January 2009. Nakamoto's identity remains unknown. All individual components of bitcoin originated in earlier academic literature. Nakamoto's innovation was their complex interplay resulting in the first decentralized, Sybil resistant, Byzantine fault tolerant digital cash system, that would eventually be referred to as the first blockchain.Nakamoto's paper was not peer reviewed and was initially ignored by academics, who argued that it could not work.

On 3 January 2009, the bitcoin network was created when Nakamoto mined the starting block of the chain, known as the genesis block.Embedded in this block was the text "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", which is the date and headline of an issue of The Times newspaper. Nine days later, Hal Finney received the first bitcoin transaction: ten bitcoins from Nakamoto.[18] Wei Dai and Nick Szabo were also early supporters.On May 22, 2010, the first known commercial transaction using bitcoin occurred when programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Papa John's pizzas for ₿10,000, in what would later be celebrated as "Bitcoin Pizza Day".

2010–2012: Early growth

Blockchain analysts estimate that Nakamoto had mined about one million bitcoins[20] before disappearing in 2010 when he handed the network alert key and control of the code repository over to Gavin Andresen. Andresen later became lead developer at the Bitcoin Foundation,[21][22] an organization founded in September 2012 to promote bitcoin.

After early "proof-of-concept" transactions, the first major users of bitcoin were black markets, such as the dark web Silk Road. During its 30 months of existence, beginning in February 2011, Silk Road exclusively accepted bitcoins as payment, transacting ₿9.9 million, worth about $214 million.[24]: 222 

2013–2014: First regulatory actions

In March 2013, the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) established regulatory guidelines for "decentralized virtual currencies" such as bitcoin, classifying American bitcoin miners who sell their generated bitcoins as money services businesses, subject to registration and other legal obligations.[25] In May 2013, US authorities seized the unregistered exchange Mt. Gox.[26]