04 Jan 2014 / Washington Post – The world’s first fully decentralized cryptographic financial network, Bitcoin, launched five years ago today. The years since then have been a wild ride. The currency’s value has risen from nothing to billions of dollars, and millions have been invested in Bitcoin-related startups. Here’s a brief synopsis of Bitcoin’s most important milestones.
Jan. 3, 2009: Satoshi Nakamoto launches the Bitcoin network by creating the “genesis block,” the first entry in Bitcoin’s global transaction register. It includes the following text: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
Jan. 9: Nakamoto announces Bitcoin version 0.1, on the Cypherpunks mailing list. Previously, in November 2008, he posted a paper to the list that explained the design of the Bitcoin network.
Jan. 11: Some people immediately recognize that if Bitcoin catches on, its early users will get rich. Hal Finney estimates that if Bitcoin became the world’s reserve currency, each Bitcoin could be worth as much as $10 million. “The possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet,” he says. Nakamoto agrees: “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on.” Finney mines bitcoins for a few days, but then he turns the program off because it makes his computer run too hot.
Jan. 12: The first Bitcoin transaction occurs, as Nakamoto sends some Bitcoins to Finney.
Aug. 15: Bitcoin is slowly attracting users. Tyler Gillies sends a note to the bitcoin-list e-mail list. “i just downloaded bitcoin, epic piece of software. the digital cash age has arrived.” It was the only post to the mailing list that month.
Dec. 30: Growing interest in Bitcoin leads to the first increase in the difficulty of bitcoin-mining. The network automatically adjusts the difficulty of producing bitcoins so that a new batch is produced every 10 minutes, on average. By Dec. 30, 2009, there were enough miners that the network had to increase the difficulty to prevent bitcoins from being generated too quickly.
May 18, 2010: Laszlo Hanyecz is widely regarded as the first person to spend bitcoins in a “real” financial transaction. He offered 10,000 BTC for anyone who would order him a pizza. Someone did. The transaction valued each bitcoin at around $0.0025. Today, those 10,000 BTC would be worth around $8 million….. Read more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/03/five-years-of-bitcoin-in-one-post/
