History of bitcoin
is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
Background
Prior to the release of bitcoin, there were a number of digital cash technologies, starting with the issuer-based ecash protocols of David Chaum and Stefan Brands. The idea that solutions to computational puzzles could have some value was first proposed by cryptographers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in 1992.31 October 1996 NSA paper
12 years prior to creating Bitcoin the NSA published the white paper "How To Make A Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash"Adam Back
The idea 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 were Wei Dai's b-money and Nick Szabo's bit gold. Hal Finney developed reusable proof of work using hashcash as proof of work algorithm.In the bit gold proposal which proposed a collectible market-based mechanism for inflation control, Nick Szabo also investigated some additional aspects including a Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement protocol based on quorum addresses to store and transfer the chained proof-of-work solutions, which was vulnerable to Sybil attacks, though.
Creation
On 18 August 2008, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered. Later that year, on 31 October, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list. This paper detailed methods of using a peer-to-peer network to generate what was described as "a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust". On 3 January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of bitcoin, which had a reward of 50 bitcoins. Embedded in the genesis block was the text:The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
The text refers to a headline in The Times published on 3 January 2009. This note has been interpreted as both a timestamp of the genesis date and a derisive comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.
The first open source bitcoin client was released on 9 January 2009, hosted at SourceForge.
One of the first supporters, adopters, contributors to bitcoin and receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was programmer Hal Finney. Finney downloaded the bitcoin software the day it was released, and received 10 bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world's first bitcoin transaction on 12 January 2009. Other early supporters were Wei Dai, creator of bitcoin predecessor b-money, and Nick Szabo, creator of bitcoin predecessor bit gold. One of the first miners included James Howells, who subsequently lost thousands of Bitcoin to a landfill in Newport.
In the early days, Nakamoto is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins. Before disappearing from any involvement in bitcoin, Nakamoto in a sense handed over the reins to developer Gavin Andresen, who then became the bitcoin lead developer at the Bitcoin Foundation, the 'anarchic' bitcoin community's closest thing to an official public face.
Satoshi Nakamoto
"Satoshi Nakamoto" is presumed to be a pseudonym for the person or people who designed the original bitcoin protocol in 2007 then released the whitepaper in 2008 and finally launched the network in 2009. Nakamoto was responsible for creating the majority of the official bitcoin software and was active in making modifications and posting technical information on the bitcoin forum. There has been much speculation as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto with suspects including Dai, Szabo, and Finney and accompanying denials. The possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto was a computer collective in the European financial sector has also been discussed.Investigations into the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto were attempted by The New Yorker and Fast Company. The New Yorker's investigation brought up at least two possible candidates: Michael Clear and Vili Lehdonvirta. Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence linking an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's, and textual analysis revealed that the phrase "... computationally impractical to reverse" appeared in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.
In May 2013, Ted Nelson speculated that Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki is Satoshi Nakamoto. Later in 2013 the Israeli researchers Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir pointed to Silk Road–linked Ross William Ulbricht as the possible person behind the cover. The two researchers based their suspicion on an analysis of the network of bitcoin transactions. These allegations were contested, and Ron and Shamir later retracted their claim.
Nakamoto's involvement with bitcoin does not appear to extend past mid-2010. In April 2011, Nakamoto communicated with a bitcoin contributor, saying that he had "moved on to other things".
Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's 500-plus bitcoin forum posts; the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Because this pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was asleep at this time, and the hours of 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. GMT are midnight to 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Other clues suggested that Nakamoto was British: A newspaper headline he had encoded in the genesis block came from the UK-published newspaper The Times, and both his forum posts and his comments in the bitcoin source code used British English spellings, such as "optimise" and "colour".
An Internet search by an anonymous blogger of texts similar in writing to the bitcoin whitepaper suggests Nick Szabo's "bit gold" articles as having a similar author. Nick denied being Satoshi, and stated his official opinion on Satoshi and bitcoin in a May 2011 article.
In a March 2014 article in Newsweek, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman doxed Dorian S. Nakamoto of Temple City, California, saying that Satoshi Nakamoto is the man's birth name. Her methods and conclusion drew widespread criticism.
In June 2016, the London Review of Books published a piece by Andrew O'Hagan about Nakamoto.
After a May 2020 YouTube documentary pointed to Adam Back as the creator of bitcoin, widespread discussion ensued. The real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto still remains a matter of dispute.
Growth
2010
The first notable retail transaction involving physical goods was paid on May 22, 2010, by exchanging 10,000 mined BTC for two pizzas delivered from a Papa John's in Jacksonville, Florida. Laszlo Hanyecz, who lives in Jacksonville, created a thread in an online forum offering the bitcoins for anyone who could order him two pizzas. Jeremy Sturdivant, a user from England accepted the offer and ordered the pizzas to his home. The 10,000 Bitcoins were worth about $40 USD at the time. This event would mark May 22 as the Bitcoin Pizza Day for crypto-fans. At the time, a transaction's value was typically negotiated on the Bitcoin forum.On 6 August 2010, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was spotted. While the protocol did verify that a transaction's outputs never exceeded its inputs, a transaction whose outputs summed to more than would overflow, permitting the transaction author to create arbitrary amounts of bitcoin. On 15 August, the vulnerability was exploited; a single transaction spent 0.5 bitcoin to send just over 92 billion bitcoins to each of two different addresses on the network. Within hours, the transaction was spotted, the bug was fixed, and the blockchain was forked by miners using an updated version of the bitcoin protocol. Since the blockchain was forked below the problematic transaction, the transaction no longer appears in the blockchain used by the Bitcoin network today. This was the only major security flaw found and exploited in bitcoin's history.
2011
Based on bitcoin's open-source code, other cryptocurrencies started to emerge.The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group, started accepting bitcoins in January 2011, then stopped accepting them in June 2011, citing concerns about a lack of legal precedent about new currency systems. The EFF's decision was reversed on 17 May 2013 when they resumed accepting bitcoin.
In May 2011, bitcoin payment processor, BitPay was founded to provide mobile checkout services to companies wanting to accept bitcoins as a form of payment.
In June 2011, WikiLeaks and other organizations began to accept bitcoins for donations.
2012
In January 2012, bitcoin was featured as the main subject within a fictionalized trial on the CBS legal drama The Good Wife in the third-season episode "Bitcoin for Dummies". The host of CNBC's Mad Money, Jim Cramer, played himself in a courtroom scene where he testifies that he does not consider bitcoin a true currency, saying, "There's no central bank to regulate it; it's digital and functions completely peer to peer".In September 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation was launched to "accelerate the global growth of bitcoin through standardization, protection, and promotion of the open source protocol". The founders were Gavin Andresen, Jon Matonis, Mark Karpelès, Charlie Shrem, and Peter Vessenes.
In October 2012, BitPay reported having over 1,000 merchants accepting bitcoin under its payment processing service. In November 2012, WordPress started accepting bitcoins.