By
Steve Muchoki
April 18th, 2024
This year’s Halloween marks another milestone as 9 years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, released its white paper.
2017 has been one hell of a phenomenal journey for Bitcoin with its price recently touching an all-time-high value of $6400 and crossed a market cap over $100 billion valuations. Yesterday, 31st October 2017 marked the completion of nine years to the now glorious journey of Bitcoin. It was back in 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto presented the first white-paper named “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”
The white-paper talks of the revolutionary technology which presents an infrastructure for a completely decentralized and peer-to-peer monetary system. This was first-of-its-kind online payment method that required no third-party involvement like banks or any other financial institutions.
The few initial lines of the white-paper talks about the basic attributes of Bitcoin. “[Bitcoin] a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.”
The Bitcoin network was officially launched back in 2009 after Nakamoto mining the first block. Now, bitcoin is said to be the most traded currency with trading volumes crossing $2 billion and even sometimes topping to $4 billion leaving behind Apple Inc. which is said to be the most traded liquid stock.
The decentralized blockchain technology which backs Bitcoin was released in 2009 which provided an alternate perception of money and a completely new financial system in place which doesn’t involve any government regulatory bodies or banks and is only regulated by people using it. In past year, Bitcoin has witnessed an unprecedented surge in investor participation with a huge number of people showing trust in this system.
Bitcoin was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis wherein the entire banking sector has collapsed and people’s trust in the centralized banking system was shaken. However, there was a very lukewarm acceptance of such an alternate form of system and it is only in the past two years where there has been an increasing investor participation and interest into Bitcoins.
The journey of Bitcoin has had its own share of ups and down. Quite recently it has been in the target zone of several top financial institutions from Wall Street as Bitcoin is expected to pose a real threat to its existence in future. However, the supporters of Bitcoin has so far managed to out-weight this pessimism circulating around it and took Bitcoin to new highs.
Several countries like Japan, U.S., South Korea, HongKong and the Philippines have openly allowed for trading of Bitcoins within the country. In April this year, Japan gave Bitcoins a legal status allowing its use as a payments method within the country.