A Brief History of Bitcoin
Key milestones that shaped the first and largest cryptocurrency.
What you’ll learn
- •2008: the Bitcoin whitepaper is published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto; 2009: the network launches with the genesis block.
- •The genesis block permanently embeds a newspaper headline about a bank bailout, widely read as a symbolic statement.
- •May 2010's 'Bitcoin Pizza Day' — 10,000 BTC for two pizzas — is the first known real-world commercial Bitcoin transaction.
- •The 2010s brought the first exchanges and wallets, along with early exchange collapses and growing regulatory attention.
- •Bitcoin has been through multiple dramatic boom-and-bust cycles alongside steadily widening institutional and mainstream adoption.
- •Bitcoin's history follows a recognisable pattern seen in many new asset classes: hype, crash, scepticism, and gradual maturation.
- •Despite everything that's changed around it, Bitcoin still runs on the same decentralised, open-source foundation it launched with.
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