History

Where did Bitcoin begin? Was it with the internet, or the invention of money itself? Many moments could be called Year Zero, but perhaps the best place to start is 1979. That year, Ralph Merkle designed a cryptographic structure that became one of Bitcoin’s most important building blocks. Satoshi, and everyone who followed, built on his work. As Isaac Newton wrote in 1675, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Merkle was one of them.

As mass surveillance expanded, so did the pushback. In 1988, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto warned of a world where privacy would vanish. The cypherpunks responded, using encryption to fight back. By 1993, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto made their mission clear. Fifteen years later, Bitcoin emerged, a decentralized answer to control and surveillance.

Mailing lists may be swerved today but in the 90s were ideal for exchanging ideas. When a bunch of San Fran cryptographers took their informal discussions to the web, the Cypherpunk list was born. A who’s who of early internet pioneers, including Cypherpunk’s Manifesto author Eric Hughes, its members were ahead of their time.

Public key cryptography is the foundation on which cryptocurrency is built. It allows a private key to prove bitcoin ownership by signing a public key. David Chaum’s blind signature technology got the ball rolling, enabling a message to be verified without revealing its contents. A small step for Cypherpunk Chaum but a giant leap for mankind.

In the physical world, a wall is proof that labourers have been stacking bricks all day. In the digital world, Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the equivalent. Created by Cypherpunk Adam Back, PoW shows that a job has been done without cutting corners. It forms a foolproof system for adding blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Before Bitcoin, there was BitTorrent. Created by Bram Cohen in 2001, the peer-to-peer network pioneered decentralised file sharing and data distribution, forming a self-sustaining organism that was hard to censor or shut down. Satoshi was taking notes.

Like Proof of Work and blind signatures, Secure Hash Algorithm 256 predates Bitcoin by years. Developed by the National Security Agency, SHA-256 provides strong cryptographic guarantees. Satoshi recognized its suitability for creating secure transaction hashes and for devising the math problem miners must solve. Bitcoin simply wouldn’t work without this powerful encryption algorithm.

Conceived by early Bitcoin supporter Hal Finney, Reusable Proof of Work (RPOW) was proposed software for powering digital cash. The concept involves a digital token that costs a fixed amount of real-world resources to mint. Although Finney's prototype never made it into production, the Cypherpunks were taking note.

Before Bitcoin, there was Bit Gold. Nick Szabo's idea for a digital currency was one of several Cypherpunk concepts that never made it into production, yet it’s the most influential money that never was.

While Satoshi was crafting the Bitcoin codebase in 2008, a financial crisis was unfolding. Reckless lending by US banks triggered a housing crash that took out Lehman Brothers, sparked a global recession, and exacerbated widespread mistrust of financial institutions. When the banks got bailed out, the public were outraged.

When an entity calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto registered Bitcoin.org in summer 2008, no one knew or cared. It was just another unremarkable domain – but that was all to change in a matter of months. Always several moves ahead, Satoshi had shrewdly bought and hosted the domain anonymously.

As a technical document, a whitepaper isn’t generally read by anyone save a handful of academics. When Satoshi published “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” in 2008, it gathered little attention at first. Today it’s been published in over 40 languages, cited over 20,000 times, published on government websites, and embedded on Apple computers.

On January 3rd, 2009, Satoshi initiated a genesis event by running the Bitcoin software in a live environment for the first time. The most famous moment in Bitcoin history, the event is rich with symbolism, starting with the notorious Times headline encoded in block 0: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

Bitcoin was Satoshi’s baby but its creator always intended to share it with the world. That transition began with the release of the source code describing Bitcoin’s inner workings. Shared to the Cryptography Mailing List on January 8th 2009, the first codebase delineates Satoshi’s vision.

A Bitcoin block, comprising a batch of new transactions, is published to the blockchain every 10 minutes on average. So why did it take six days for the second block to appear? The web is awash with theories as to why Satoshi allowed so much time to elapse between blocks 0 and 1. Some believe he was trying to simulate his own genesis event, creating the world of Bitcoin in seven days.

On January 9th, the Bitcoin ledger began processing blocks with regularity. Three days later, the first transaction appeared in a block. Its sender was Satoshi of course and its recipient Hal Finney, the most famous “known” bitcoiner of all. Blocks would eventually start filling with hundreds and then thousands of transactions.

Only a handful of people ever corresponded directly with Satoshi. One was Martti Malmi, a Finnish computer scientist who reached out in May 2009 offering help. Satoshi replied, “Your understanding of Bitcoin is spot on,” sparking a mentorship that shaped Bitcoin’s early days.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a type of instant messenger that was once popular with tech-savvy web users. When Bitcoin began, users needed a place to chat in real-time and IRC was a natural outlet. The #bitcoin channel on Freenode was where peer discovery first occurred, allowing miners to connect to other miners.

While Hal Finney is credited with the first Bitcoin transaction, another early adopter, Martti Malmi, is famed for completing the first bitcoin-fiat transaction. In October 2009, he sold 5,050 BTC for $5.02 using PayPal. The sale was conducted on NewLibertyStandard, a basic website that formed the world’s first Bitcoin exchange.

With Bitcoin growing and IRC’s limitations becoming apparent, a permanent home was needed for community discussion. Registered by Satoshi on November 17th, 2009, the Bitcointalk forum, as it came to be known, is where most of Nakamoto’s known writings originate and remain to this day. The forum quickly grew into a lively hub where bold ideas were shared, future pioneers were made, and historic events in Bitcoin history occurred.

Bitcoins are mined by performing billions of computationally intensive calculations per second to solve a complex math problem. If you tried to mine bitcoin with your PC today, it would take years. But in 2009, that’s how it was done. Back then, the mining difficulty was much lower and there were fewer miners competing, making the humble PC perfect for the job.

As Bitcoin's first anniversary loomed, there were enough miners contributing to the network that a difficulty adjustment was justified. This would make it harder to find a new block, ensuring that one would be produced every 10 minutes on average. In the Bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi proposed a simple formula to move the mining difficulty up – and occasionally down. It's still used today.

The Bitcoin ₿ symbol has become a global icon, but where did it originate? It was created by Bitcointalk user NewLiberty Standard, founder of the informal Bitcoin exchange of the same name. He derived the symbol from the Thai baht ฿ and was also responsible for changing Bitcoin’s abbreviation from BC to BTC.

Three months after NewLibertyStandard created an informal Bitcoin exchange, a new platform was developed that more closely resembled a conventional exchange. When Bitcoin Market went live in March 2010, you could buy 333 BTC for a dollar, but with greater liquidity came rapid price discovery. Bitcoin was about to take off.

One of the greatest debates in Bitcoin’s early days was what to do with it. Spend it like money? Hoard it like gold? On March 20th, 2010, forum member BitcoinFX hosted a poker tournament with a 1500 BTC prize pool. Most of the 10 players were bots, but human winner dwdollar walked away with 600 BTC.

In its early days, the Bitcointalk forum was awash with creative ideas from early adopters. User SmokeTooMuch is credited with attempting the world’s first bitcoin auction, asking $50 for 10,000 BTC. Surprisingly, there were few takers: the highest bid was $25 and the proposed sale failed.

One of the earliest use cases for Bitcoin emerged when the developer of “A Tale in the Desert” decided to accept BTC as payment for his game. For 2,000 BTC, players could purchase a month’s credit for the ancient Egyptian MMORPG. This milestone provided a source of revenue for the game, despite lacking a fiat onramp, and moved the needle for Bitcoin’s utility.

When Laszlo Hanyecz offered to pay 10,000 BTC – then worth just $41 – for two Papa John's pizzas, history was made. It was the first time bitcoin had been used to buy physical goods. The food was delivered, Pizza Day was born, and Laszlo was immortalised as the man behind the world’s first and most expensive bitcoin purchase.

One of the greatest challenges when it came to widening adoption was getting bitcoin into the hands of non-miners. Gavin Andresen devised The Bitcoin Faucet, a website that dispensed 5 BTC to anyone who completed a captcha. The project earned praise from Satoshi who struck up a working relationship with the resourceful Andresen.

In its early, illiquid days, bitcoin was highly volatile. The first major pump is credited to tech site Slashdot mentioning the cryptocurrency in July 2010. Most users were skeptical but some clearly bought in: bitcoin climbed 10x, with the "Slashdot effect" draining the faucet on Andresen’s free bitcoin site.

For Bitcoin’s first 18 months, mining relied on desktop CPUs. But by mid-2010, GPUs changed the game. Miner ArtForz pioneered the shift, briefly controlling 25% of the network and earning 1,700 BTC in six days. A new, more powerful mining era had begun – the race was on.

“If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.” The Bitcoin canon is filled with memorable Satoshi sentences, but this is the ultimate mic drop moment. Ever polite, this was the closest Satoshi came to sounding vexed at those who failed to grasp the beauty of Bitcoin.

Like any new software, the Bitcoin codebase wasn't immune from bugs. The most notorious occurred on August 15th, 2010 when an unknown hacker generated 184.467 billion BTC in the Value Overflow Incident. Developer Jeff Garzik spotted the bug, Satoshi patched it by forking the blockchain and Bitcoin lived to fight another day.

When Bitcoin launched, it only had a rudimentary desktop wallet, while a mobile version was still years away. Quickly, though, its community chipped away at these challenges until December 8th, 2010 when the first mobile-to-mobile BTC transaction occurred. Forum member ribuck sent 0.42 BTC using a Nokia N900.

In 2011, WikiLeaks began accepting BTC donations after being blockaded by Visa and Mastercard. The whistleblower organisation had delayed Bitcoin integration, originally earmarked for 2010, after protests from Satoshi who predicted: “WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.” As usual, he wasn’t wrong.

The community may have had no idea, but by December 2010 Satoshi knew he had to leave Bitcoin for good. It’s natural, therefore, that his last post was concerned with proposing technical improvements. Right up to the end, Satoshi was still dreaming of ways to make Bitcoin better.

By late 2010, rising difficulty and GPU dominance ended the era of solo mining. Miners began pooling hashpower to share rewards, leading to the launch of Slush Pool. This milestone transformed Bitcoin, marking the dawn of professional mining pools and a new chapter in the network’s evolution.

Within a week of Satoshi’s final post, Gavin Andresen had become lead developer of Bitcoin. It was a role he reluctantly accepted, recognising the need to steady the ship as Satoshi faded into the darkness. On December 19th, 2010, Andresen announced the news to the Bitcointalk forum and a new era began.

Before the world could buy bitcoin, it had to discover Bitcoin. Early devotees weren’t short of zany ideas for promoting their passion, as an incident from early 2011 shows. On January 6th, a man earned 32 BTC for donning a feathered headdress and waving a sign that read “Stop the fed! Buy Bitcoin!”

On the same day that Silk Road was receiving its first users, bitcoiners were receiving a lesson in hyperinflation. Three one-hundred trillion dollar bills from Zimbabwe were traded on the #bitcoin-otc IRC for 4 BTC each. The notes were worthless but the bitcoins, part of a fixed 21 million supply, proved precious indeed.

Bitcoin’s early history can be divided into two eras: before Silk Road and after. In early 2011, Ross Ulbricht, posting as “altoid,” linked to the darknet site where magic mushrooms could be bought with BTC – and soon much harder drugs. The events this casual forum post set in motion would have massive ramifications for Ross and take Bitcoin to a shadowy place – the dark web.

As the world was starting to connect Bitcoin with darknet markets, more innocuous use cases were being explored. In 2011, StarCraft enthusiasts hosted a bitcoin-backed tournament for the Blizzard strategy game. While the first four finishers received USD, positions 5-8 received the consolation of 25 BTC apiece – a prize that was never claimed.

In late 2010, Satoshi ghosted the Bitcointalk forum but it would be another four months until he disappeared completely. On April 23, 2011, he sent his penultimate dispatch to Mike Hearn, concluding “I’ve moved on to other things.” Satoshi’s final known email would be sent three days later to his successor – Gavin Andresen.

As 2011 ground into high gear, Bitcoin was beginning to be taken seriously but it was still hard to buy and sell with fiat currency. In May, it acquired its first ecommerce solution, allowing websites to accept BTC at checkout. BitPay made this milestone possible and it remains one of the leading Bitcoin payment solutions to this day.

“I am pretty confident we are the new wealthy elite, gentlemen.” This flippant forum post was as amusing as it was prescient. As BTC touched the $20 mark in June 2011, the OP predicted that 10 BTC would make their holder rich one day. They were, like so many Bitcointalk users back then, ahead of their time.

As Bitcoin users acclimatised to the digital currency, rookie mistakes such as failing to encrypt wallets were inevitable – and it wasn’t just beginners who were prone to making opsec errors. When BTC spiked in value in June 2011, reaching $30, opportunists began circling. Bitcointalk member allinvain has the dubious honour of becoming the first hack victim, losing 25,000 BTC.

As Bitcoin entered the radar of national governments, it was inevitable the three-letter agencies would take note. The tech utilised, after all, a SHA algorithm developed with the aid of the NSA. When Gavin Andresen was invited to present on Bitcoin to the CIA, however, it sparked controversy, with some community members even blaming the event for prompting Satoshi’s exit.

Hanging out on internet forums was fine, but by summer 2011, bitcoiners were itching to interact in real life. The first Bitcoin conference was held at the Roosevelt Hotel, NYC on August 19th and provided an opportunity to put faces to pseudonyms. Attendees included Jed McCaleb, Jeff Garzik, and Gavin Andresen.

In 2011, the digital became physical with the release of the first mass-market cold storage devices for BTC. Developed by Mike Caldwell, the Casascius physical Bitcoin range came preloaded with denominations of up to 1,000 BTC. Today they are collector’s items, both for their scarcity and their rich contents.

As more developers contributed to Bitcoin’s codebase, a system of peer review was needed to minimise the risk of bugs creeping in. Amir Taaki suggested the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) as a means of codifying new features. On August 19th, 2011 Amir submitted the first BIP and the framework has been a cornerstone of Bitcoin development ever since.

For as long as they have been mined, bitcoins have been lost. Human error has consigned billions of dollars of BTC at current prices to the digital wilderness. On October 29th, 2011, Mt. Gox did its part to reduce Bitcoin’s circulating supply by accidentally sending 2,609 BTC to invalid addresses where it lies forever irretrievable.

Where there’s money, there’s scammers pushing ponzis. It was inevitable that Bitcoin would attract its own unsustainable scheme and it arrived in 2011 with Bitcoin Savings & Trust, operated by a character called Pirate. As it transpired, there were no savings and there was no trust by the time the project evaporated with 150,000 BTC.

As Bitcoin’s value rose, miners and innovators rushed to claim new BTC. By 2011, China emerged as a mining hub, producing the first dedicated bitcoin miner – the FPGA-based “Pumpkin Miner.” Flawed yet pioneering, it sparked an arms race among hardware makers that would reshape the mining landscape.

Bitcoin boasts a strong philanthropic movement whose origins can be traced to November 2011 when Bruno Kucinskasin launched an initiative to convince charities to accept BTC. Bitcoin100 aimed to get 100 supporters to pledge 1 BTC before giving it to a charity willing to embed a Bitcoin donation button on their site. It was a wild success.

It was inevitable that Bitcoin would make its TV debut. But no one could have guessed the show would be The Good Wife. The political drama dedicated an entire episode to Bitcoin including a scene where the aptly named Dylan Stack described BTC as “the future” of money. When the episode aired, bitcoin was trading for just $7.

Speculation is Bitcoin’s oldest use case and it ramped up in 2012 with the launch of SatoshiDice. The high-low gambling game sucked players in as blocks filled with SatoshiDice transactions, prompting critics to label it a DDoS attack. Creator Erik Voorhees eventually sold the site for a fortune and went on to launch ShapeShift.

On January 25, 2012, Bitcoin got its first periodical to report on the many ways in which BTC was now intersecting with the world. Bitcoin Magazine didn’t just put BTC on the map – it did the same for its founding members. Chief among them was a precocious teenager called Vitalik Buterin.

By 2012, Bitcoin was no longer underground – yet buying coins was still difficult for newcomers. In June, a P2P marketplace called LocalBitcoins launched. It used an escrow mechanism and allowed payments to be made by bank transfer or cash. LocalBitcoins quickly became one of the primary on-ramps for entering the industry, allowing individuals to quietly acquire BTC without falling afoul of payment processors.

The bitcoin mining arms race ramped up in 2012 with the emergence of the ASIC – a new type of hardware that promised to find blocks faster than ever. Manufacturer Butterfly Labs took hundreds of pre-orders at 5,000 BTC per machine before dragging its heels and ultimately failing to deliver the mini-rigs. The company’s name still causes shivers in the mining community today.

Every industry has an organisation to advocate its interests in the wider world. Bitcoin joined the club in September 2012 with the Bitcoin Foundation, tasked with accelerating the standardisation, protection, and promotion of the open source protocol. Founder members included Gavin Andresen, Charlie Shrem, Mark Karpelès, and Roger Ver.

Evidence of Bitcoin’s maturation as an asset arrived in late 2012 when Bitfinex launched. Unlike existing spot exchanges, Bitfinex offered BTC lending and leveraged trading. The platform attracted professional traders and paved the way for high leverage exchanges such as BitMEX that would turn Bitcoin into a traders’ paradise.

So much of crypto as it is known today began life on Bitcoin – including NFTs. In March 2012, Colored Coins introduced the idea of non-fungible tokens to the Bitcoin network. The project enabled BTC transactions to be assigned tags corresponding with real-world services or assets. Although Colored Coins never took off, it blazed a trail for NFTs.

Every four years, the block reward granted to Bitcoin miners reduces by half. The first such halving event fell on November 28, 2012, when the reward dropped from 50 to 25 BTC. On the big day, the community hosted halving parties, baking Bitcoin cakes, toasting Satoshi, and celebrating how far the movement had come in the space of four years.

There are many memes but only a few become immortal. Magic Internet Money, depicting an MS Paint wizard, was one. Designed to promote the r/bitcoin board, it became the most popular Reddit ad ever and is credited with helping BTC reach $1,000.

From beyond the digital grave, Satoshi continued to be vindicated. In March 2013, Cyprus dipped into its citizens’ savings after the nation’s bonds were downgraded to junk status. As Bitcoin’s founder had warned, “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”

Bitcoiners have celebrated surpassing every symbolic price point since $10. The $100 moment was particularly sweet, though, toasted when community culture was sufficiently developed to do the three-figure club justice. Enthusiasts pulled up charts and streamed to YouTube, roller coaster memes were born, and Bitcoin motored into second gear. It was just getting started.

It wasn’t surprising that Bitcoin’s rising value should attract criminals. But it was surprising that those lawless elements should originate from the DEA. In 2013, a law enforcement agent stole thousands of BTC from Silk Road drug dealers. At the same time, another rogue agent was perpetrating similar crimes on Silk Road.

As Bitcoin’s market cap grew, it began to attract interest from city traders. In May 2013, three entrepreneurs decided to accelerate the crossover by establishing the Bitcoin Center in NYC’s financial district. It promoted Bitcoin and united buyers and sellers through an open outcry format that fuelled a thriving BTC trading floor in Satoshi Square.

There’s dumb and then there’s deliberately destroying the private key to a 13 BTC wallet dumb. As tech media, Wired should have known better than to fade Bitcoin, but its staffers seemed intent on proving some point about value being an “abstraction.” The publication has never lived it down.

Bitcoin is to money what honey badger is to nature: it just don’t care. This antagonistic attitude was captured in June 2013 when Roger Ver paid for a giant billboard describing Bitcoin as “the honey badger of money.” The hoarding near Highway 101 amused bitcoiners – even if it left nocoiners nonplussed.

The same month that Bitcoin was making in-roads into the city, it was infiltrating the art world. In 2013, a bitcoiner asked Ali Spagnola to create her interpretation of a bitcoin and paid her $50 in BTC for the commission. Eight years later, the founder of the Free Paintings project realised her $50 was now worth $40K. From the very start, the ties between Bitcoin and the artist community ran deep.

By 2013, some Bitcoin was already lost forever – most famously James Howells’ discarded hard drive in Wales, still buried today. An estimated 4 million BTC are unrecoverable. As Satoshi noted, “Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more.”

In October 2013, Silk Road, the site that had propelled Bitcoin into the limelight, was shut down and its founder arrested. The pseudonymous Dread Pirate Roberts proved to be 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht and his subsequent life sentence without parole was widely regarded as a miscarriage of justice. Thankfully, there was to be a happy ending to this tragic story – even if it was a long time coming.

All through 2013, Bitcoin kept breaking the wall that separates internet from the physical world. It did it again on October 29 when the first Bitcoin ATM went live in Vancouver. The terminal, located in a coffee shop, allowed anyone to swap cash for BTC and vice-versa. Replicas were soon being rolled out globally.

At the tail-end of 2013, Bitcoin briefly surpassed the price of an ounce of gold when it hit $1,242. It was the first time digital scarcity overtook physical gold in price per unit, marking a symbolic shift in how value could be stored. But zooming out told a different story: gold’s market cap stood at $6 trillion, while Bitcoin’s was just $13 billion – barely 0.2%. The real flippening lay ahead – but it was progress nonetheless.

By the time Bitcoin passed $1,000 in 2013, it had made many early adopters very rich. One of them decided to swap their coins for a shiny new Lamborghini and the Bitcoin Lambo meme was born. To this day, you haven’t made it in Bitcoin, some memesters aver, until you’ve bought a Lambo.

Born out of a drunken forum rant discouraging people from selling their coins, HODL has assumed a life of its own. The inebriated user was trying to write “hold” but came out with something the internet decided was way better. By 2017, HODL had transcended the Bitcointalk forum and become an entire philosophy.

The repercussions from Ross Ulbricht’s arrest would take years to die down as the feds focused on mopping up individuals they believed had profited from the darknet drugs marketplace he ran. In January 2014, Bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem was arrested and subsequently imprisoned for failing to KYC a customer whose funds came from Silk Road. The KYC police were just getting started with Bitcoin.

New York was a major hub of Bitcoin adoption in 2013, so hopes were high that the city’s attempt to regulate the industry would bring clarity and allow serious players to enter. The BitLicense emerged within days of Charlie Shrem's arrest as the city looked to clean up its act. Unfortunately, the legislation was a labyrinthine maze of legalese and onerous compliance demands that required an army of lawyers just to parse.

Counterparty was one of the first protocols to be built on top of Bitcoin, supporting the creation of “metacoins” and non-fungible token collections such as Spells of Genesis and Rare Pepe. It played a foundational role in shaping the evolution of digital assets, NFTs, and the broader ecosystem of blockchain-based protocols that followed.

At its peak, Mt. Gox accounted for 70% of all bitcoin traded globally. The demise of the Japanese exchange, scuppered by mismanagement and multiple hacks, is one of the darkest days in Bitcoin history. When Gox filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, citing $473M in liabilities, its creditors were left in limbo. Their wait for restitution was to prove more protracted than anyone could have imagined.

The media had long been obsessed with unmasking Satoshi Nakamoto, and its doxxing campaign hit a low in 2014 when Newsweek named the elderly Dorian Nakamoto as Bitcoin’s creator. The outraged crypto community held a fundraiser for Dorian whose puzzled face is still synonymous with Satoshi.

Everything in life is taxable – even Bitcoin. When the IRS decreed that BTC should be taxed as property in 2014, it brought clarity to some US citizens but consternation to others who’d hoped the cryptocurrency might escape scrutiny. That the world’s most notorious tax agency should be discussing Bitcoin, however, had at least one upside: it legitimised its status.

You know your magic internet money’s being taken seriously when Bloomberg adds it to its financial Terminal. In April 2014 the once-unthinkable happened when BTC made the grade, jostling for screen space alongside stocks, bonds, and equities. There was no going back now.

No entity should ever command 51% of the Bitcoin hashrate, since doing so theoretically enables them to reorder transactions. Despite this objective, it’s happened on multiple occasions, most famously when the Ghash mining pool dominated network hashrate in 2014. Thankfully, it did no evil and miners worked quickly to reallocate their hash power. To this day, Bitcoin has never suffered a 51% attack by a malevolent mining pool.

When the Feds seized 170,000 BTC from Silk Road, they couldn’t just hodl for life. Sooner or later the coins would have to be offloaded onto the market. In June 2014, venture capitalist Tim Draper bagged 30,000 of the black market BTC at auction, netting himself the deal of the century.

With hacks and errors depriving many crypto users of their digital currency, better custodial solutions were badly needed. In January 2014, Trezor launched the first bitcoin hardware wallet, giving users the option to keep their coins in cold storage. An entire hardware wallet industry has since spawned, with devices becoming ever more sophisticated.

Satoshi’s disappearance was unfortunate but understandable. Hal Finney’s exit, on the other hand, was tragic. The recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction was diagnosed with ALS in 2009. The end came in August 2014 when Hal succumbed to the neurodegenerative disease. But it’s not just his contribution to Bitcoin history that’s been immortalised – so has his body, which has been cryogenically frozen.

No one paid much attention when a company called Tether launched a stablecoin called USDT in 2014. It seemed a niche instrument that might be useful as a base trading pair and for hedging against Bitcoin at best. And at first, that’s exactly what it was used for. Stablecoins became the dry powder for traders looking to time their entry into the market and move funds between exchanges. But things snowballed from there, with stablecoins evolving into a multi-billion dollar asset class with a myriad of use cases.

The bigger the fish, the greater the trophy. In October 2014, a Bitcoin whale placed a huge sell wall of 30,000 BTC. For Bitcoin to rise further, every single one of those coins would need to be bought. The market duly obliged, working together to slay the mysterious “Bearwhale” following an almighty order book battle.

“HODL” isn’t the only misspelling to have become a Bitcoin meme. When BTC began to rally in late 2014, one redditor got a bit carried away as they jubilantly typed “This is it gentlemen.” A single missing word was all it took for Bitcoin to gain a new cultural reference. This is the story of “This is gentlemen.”

Satoshi knew his every digital trace would be forensically examined one day. Nothing he did was an accident, starting with his stated birth date on Bitcointalk. He may have chosen April 5 to denote the day the US government forbade citizens from holding gold and 1975 to mark the year they lifted the ban.

Timestamps play a crucial role in Bitcoin, ensuring the chronological order and integrity of transactions. The concept of cryptographic timestamps was first proposed by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1991, who introduced a method for linking documents using hashes to create a tamper-proof ledger. Bitcoin builds on this idea, using timestamps combined with Proof of Work to secure the chain and prevent transactions from being falsified.

In 2017, ransomware went viral with the spread of WannaCry, software that locked up business computers and demanded payment in BTC. North Korean hackers were found to be responsible and not for the last time. It was a motif that was to dominate global cyber attacks for years to come.

August 1st, 2017 became known as Bitcoin Independence Day to mark the network’s first user-activated soft fork (UASF). It was the culmination of a year-long argument over how best to scale Bitcoin. SegWit, as the upgrade was known, made changes to Bitcoin’s code that bitterly divided the community, prompting some miners to fork the chain and launch Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin’s been beamed onto the side of buildings and projected into space, but the world was taken aback when a “Buy Bitcoin” sign appeared behind Janet Yellen during her Congress testimony in July 2017. The price of BTC rose, “Bitcoin Sign Guy” was lauded and a new meme was born.

Some miners and community members opposed the SegWit upgrade, believing the simplest solution to scaling Bitcoin being to increase the block size. This would allow more transactions to be included in each block – but would introduce other trade-offs. The “Big Blockers” splintered to form their own version of Bitcoin with a shared chain history and Bitcoin Cash was born.

The number of computations per second used to secure the Bitcoin network, aka the hashrate, can be hard to visualize. By 2019, a helpful metaphor was conjured when it was reported that the hashrate now equaled 10x the number of grains of sand on earth. For the record, that’s 69 quintillion hashes per second.

As censorship-resistant currency, Bitcoin is designed to withstand systemic shocks including nuclear warfare. Since 2017, internet failure has been one of added to the list of events it is impervious to thanks to Blockstream. The developer’s satellite network, comprising multiple geostationary devices, carries the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing terrestrial users to sync an entire node without a web connection.

On August 24, 2017, SegWit was activated on the Bitcoin network. The protocol upgrade increased the block size, enabling more transactions to be processed as well as Lightning Network micropayments. Despite these improvements, SegWit was a contentious upgrade that prompted bitter in-fighting in the run-up to its deployment. Despite working perfectly from a technical perspective, from an ideological one, SegWit almost broke Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was everywhere in 2017 as it rocketed towards $20K. As fund managers watched enviously and Wall Street traders FOMO’d in, one suit wasn’t having it. In September, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon broke his silence, calling Bitcoin a “fraud” that would eventually blow up. But his remarks were not as black and white as they appear, for at the same time as Dimon was dismissing Bitcoin, his company was actively exploring applications for blockchain. Eventually they’d wind up doing the same with Bitcoin.

“China FUD” (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is a perennial crypto meme, albeit one rooted in truth. From 2017 onwards, reports frequently emerged from China of the government outlawing certain crypto concepts, from ICOs to Bitcoin itself. When the People’s Bank of China announced it was targeting illegal practices involving cryptocurrencies in 2019, it wasn’t FUD."

As the market rocketed in 2017, Bitconnect, with its promise of guaranteed profits, was particularly tempting. Symbolised by “Wassa wassa” hypeman Carlos Matos, Bitconnect’s MLM scheme appeared too good to be true. Despite the red flags, investors continued to pile in until the house of cards suddenly collapsed.

Bitcoin’s remarkable year was capped in December 2017 when the world’s largest futures exchange launched BTC futures. Cboe’s decision to support bitcoin trading was seen as evidence of its maturation as an asset class. In retrospect, it was also evidence of the market top. It would take another four years for Bitcoin to reach a new all-time high.

In the same week that CBOE launched Bitcoin futures, the cryptocurrency neared $20,000 and the euphoria was palpable. Some of its more enthusiastic speculators believed bear markets to be a thing of the past. In their eyes, with institutional adoption in the bag and the whole world watching, Bitcoin was headed for greater heights.

The euphoria of December’s CBOE launch proved to be short-lived as BTC retraced before plummeting like a stone. By late January 2018, it was clear that a full-blown bear market was in effect and it was anyone’s guess where Bitcoin would bottom out. Late investors were REKT, with altcoins that had fleetingly minted paper millionaires now hemorrhaging in red candles across the board.

In what sounds like the beginning to a John le Carré novel, Russian security officers arrested scientists at a top secret nuclear warhead facility in 2018. Their crime? Mining bitcoin on a supercomputer. Covert crypto mining became all the rage, with everyone from lab assistants to students commandeering computers to crunch numbers.

Bitcoin education leapt forward with Saifedean Ammous’ The Bitcoin Standard (2018), a seminal text on its economic and social impact. Alongside it, podcasts like Let’s Talk Bitcoin!, What Bitcoin Did, Tales from the Crypt, and Once Bitten! helped inform and unite the community, bridging academia and culture.

For almost as long as it has been alive, Bitcoin has been declared dead. Eventually, supporters grew tired of their cryptocurrency being declared deceased and decided to document the premature claims. Bitcoin Obituaries contains hundreds of incidents in which the currency’s demise was predicted by mainstream media.

The tenth anniversary of the genesis block was leveraged by the Bitcoin community to emphasise the importance of self-custody. “Not your keys, not your coins” was the mantra underpinning Proof of Keys day, led by Trace Mayer. At a time of frequent exchange hacks, the campaign invited bitcoiners to put their trust in cryptography and return to the safety of self-custody.

Bitcoin scaling solution Lightning Network was rolled out in 2019, marked by a “relay” in which hundreds of people passed on a BTC microtransaction. Capable of processing one million transactions per second, Lightning Network promised to transform Bitcoin into a thriving payment network. That promise has yet to manifest – but at least the launch surpassed all expectations.

When the G20 held their annual gathering in 2019, there was a lot to discuss – including cryptocurrency. While their joint statement on crypto assets was lukewarm, they conceded that digital assets “do not pose a threat to global financial stability” but predictably raised concerns about money laundering and terrorist financing. That the world's leading nations were discussing Bitcoin, at least, was proof of how far it had come.

MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor is credited with making Bitcoin an acceptable entry on corporate balance sheets. In August 2020, his company bought its first BTC and has been stacking serious sats ever since. Along the way, Saylor has become a laser-eyed cheerleader for corporate Bitcoin while encouraging other execs to follow suit.

Bitcoin users have long used the blockchain to encode bizarre messages, ranging from marriage proposals to petty insults. In January 2021, an opportunistic bitcoiner used block 666,666 to encode a biblical message about overcoming evil with good. For emphasis, the transaction included addresses containing the words “God” and “Bible.”

It’s hard to imagine life without the internet, yet in 1997 it was a realm that most people had never experienced. In 2021, crypto economist Willy Woo noted that Bitcoin had the same amount of users as the web did in ‘97 but was growing at a faster rate. And we all know what happened next for the internet.

Bitcoin was already rising in 2021 when Tesla revealed it had added $1.5 billion BTC to its balance sheet with a little advice from Michael Saylor. For all his flirting with Dogecoin, Elon Musk’s move took the world by surprise and sent Bitcoin on a rocket ride that would see it surpass $67,000 and book Tesla a tidy profit.

Bitcoin’s ability to affect social good has long been recognised. In 2021, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey put ideas into action when he created an endowment to fund Bitcoin development in Africa and India. More than $23M was pledged, with rapper Jay Z enlisted to add a sprinkling of stardust.

On June 22nd, 2021, Bitcoin finally out‑clocked Wall Street. After years of running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Bitcoin’s market racked up more total trading hours than the S&P 500 ever had since the index’s launch in 1957.

There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. But why? Satoshi’s decision to set Bitcoin’s supply at that particular number has sparked speculation. One theory is that he wanted 0.001 BTC to eventually equal 1 EUR (it’s worth much more today). A wilder one holds that Satoshi picked 21 because he was drawn to blackjack.

In 2021 El Salvador made history when Bitcoin officially became legal tender. Despite global opposition, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele pressed ahead, sparking jubilation among bitcoiners and marking a new era for national adoption of BTC. Like it or not, Bitcoin was now political.

After SegWit, there were no major upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol for four years. In 2021, however, Taproot went live, paving the way for greater onchain privacy and transaction efficiency. It was a long journey, however, from Taproot’s origins to it activating on the Bitcoin network.

The collapse of FTX in 2022, following egregious fraud by CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, exposed the risks of centralised platforms. This event, alongside the earlier failure of Do Kwon’s Terra blockchain, caused billions in losses and highlighted the fragility of centralised blockchain services. It was a wake up call to return to the core properties that Bitcoin was built on – transparency and decentralisation.

Non-fungible tokens began life on Bitcoin as Colored Coins and they returned there over a decade later with Ordinals. Led by former Bitcoin Core contributor Casey Rodarmor, Ordinals support Bitcoin-native NFTs, and have spawned a thriving market for “rare sats” mined in early BTC blocks.

In January 2024, Bitcoin took another leap into mainstream finance with the launch of the first Bitcoin spot ETF. After years of anticipation and regulatory hurdles, the ETF approval marked a turning point for institutional adoption, providing investors a regulated way to gain exposure to Bitcoin without holding it directly. The milestone brought a surge of interest from traditional finance, opening the door for broader participation and solidifying Bitcoin’s role in global markets.

What’s the connection between Bitcoin’s hashrate and grains of sand? Both are vast numbers whose magnitude makes them hard to grasp. To help visualise the enormous work undertaken by Bitcoin miners, a memorable analogy was conjured in 2021. Switching from the sand on the beach to the stars in the sky, it drew parallels between the number of cryptographic hashes the Bitcoin network computes and the number of stars in the observable universe.

Bitcoin's ascent to six figures was a milestone celebrated across the globe. On December 4, 2024, BTC reached $100,000, cementing its place not only as a financial revolution but as a cultural phenomenon. The event was marked by jubilant tweets, memes, and even laser-eyed billboards in major cities. Institutional investors, retail traders, and hodlers alike rejoiced.

On March 6, 2025, the United States established the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve through an executive order signed by President Donald J. Trump. The historic move positioned Bitcoin as a national strategic asset. Capitalised with bitcoin seized by the U.S. government in criminal and civil asset forfeiture cases, the reserve ensures these holdings are maintained rather than liquidated, acknowledging Bitcoin as “digital gold” and reinforcing its role in global finance.

Every year is memorable for Bitcoin, but 2140 will be extra special because that’s when the last bitcoin will be mined. Due to the network’s four-yearly halving events, the reward for mining new bitcoins is periodically cut in half, making the issuance of new coins slower over time. This reward, which started out at 50 BTC per block in 2009, will eventually taper off altogether until the last extractable fraction of a bitcoin is mined in 2140.