The first transaction with bitcoin cost $42. Today, the same transaction would cost 64.2 million dollars
Ten years ago, on October 31st, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the White Paper of what would be the first decentralized virtual currency in the world; a financial system that revolutionized financial dynamics worldwide.
Despite the success of this cryptocurrency, Nakomoto’s identity remains a mystery. Behind that pseudonym, it could be a person, even a group of people, who created bitcoin’s protocol and its reference software, Bitcoin Core.
In 2008, Nakamoto published an article on the cryptography mailing list metzdowd.com, which described a digital money P2P (person to person) system. In 2009, it launched bitcoin’s software, creating a network with the same name and the first cryptocurrency: Bitcoin.
The first idea has a political vision, but when Bitcoin was born it was worth only $ 0.00076. It appeared in a white paper published online by Satoshi Nakamoto, with the aim of “making online payments directly from one person to another without going through a financial institution”.
Additionally, Nakamoto collaborated with other programmers who joined the project until mid-2010. By that time, he transferred the related domains to prominent members of the network: the bitcoin community. Then, he “left the project” to stay in anonymity. The transaction log shows that Nakamoto’s known addresses contain approximately one million bitcoins.
Bitcoin’s First Steps
In 2008 the mortgage crisis in the United States began, which would then spread to the rest of the countries and lead to a global financial crisis. This fact encouraged more distrust in banking institutions and formed a favorable ground for the adoption of Bitcoin, the decentralized alternative to financial institutions.
The first transaction between two accounts was on January 12th, 2009 and the first one in real life was on May 22nd, 2010. That day, a Florida programmer paid a surfer 10,000 bitcoins to deliver two pizzas. The transaction is equivalent to 42 dollars and marks the birth of “Bitcoin Pizza Day”. Currently, it would be equivalent to 64.2 million dollars.
In 2013, this cryptocurrency already exceeds $ 1,000 and begins to attract the attention of financial institutions.
In the abstract of the White Paper, Bitcoin is described as “an entirely person-to-person version of electronic money that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one part to another without the burden of going through a financial institution”.
Bitcoin Now
Currently, more and more people and institutions are joining the blockchain’s ecosystem. In the entire world, a large number of exchange houses have currencies integrated into the system.
Moreover, Blockchain technology and Bitcoin have been translated into a large number of languages and the first edition in Braille is currently in the process of being transcribed.
Despite the mystery, Satoshi Nakamoto’s project has revolutionized the financial world and the everyday life.
By María Rodríguez
