Satoshi Nakamoto launched the network on January 3, 2009, when he created the first block, or Block 0. However, the 50 Bitcoin reward can never be spent.
In the block, Satoshi immortalized the headline "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", which appears to be a hidden criticism of the fiat money system, which cannot do without bailing out banks - as the 2008 financial crisis, which Satoshi referenced, impressively demonstrated.
Running bitcoin-
halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009
In October 2009, Bitcoin was officially sold for the first time, namely 5,050 BTC for 5.02 US dollars. This resulted in a Bitcoin price of around 0.001 US dollars per BTC.
Martti "Sirius" Malmi, the second Bitcoin developer after Satoshi and a computer science student at the time, sold the Bitcoin to help NewLibertyStandard become the first website where you can buy BTC.
Found the first known bitcoin to USD transaction from my email backups. I sold 5,050 BTC for $5.02 on 2009-10-12. https://t.co/8XcBmzJljf-
Martti Malmi (@marttimalmi) January 15, 2014
It took around 16 months after the network was launched before anyone officially bought real-world goods with Bitcoin for the first time. Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. Although in retrospect these were very expensive pizzas, Hanyecz has no regrets as he helped to get the ball rolling.
On August 15, 2010, a previously undetected inflation bug in the network was exploited and 184 billion Bitcoin were sent. Satoshi Nakamoto and Gavin Andresen rectified the error within two hours - the transactions from block 74638 in question were reversed, as the network was barely used anyway. Something like this would be difficult to imagine today.
On 4 November 2010, Bitcoin broke the one million US dollar mark in market capitalization for the first time. At the time, one BTC was worth just under 0.40 US dollars.
In December 2010, most payment processors began blocking donations to Wikileaks - including PayPal, Visa and Mastercard. This led to a discussion in the Bitcoin forum as to whether the revelation platform should not accept donations in Bitcoin. However, Satoshi was against Bitcoin receiving so much attention so early on.
WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.
Satoshi
WikiLeaks used Bitcoin a little later to continue accepting donations.
One day after his post with the comparison to the hornet's nest in the context of the WikiLeaks issue, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote his last words in the forum.
In the message, Satoshi emphasized that there was still a lot of work to be done on DOS (Denial of Service). His last forum post could not be interpreted as a farewell.
Silk Road, a darknet marketplace that runs via Bitcoin payments, was founded in February 2011 by US programmer Ross Ulbricht. The then 26-year-old later claimed to have launched the platform for libertarian reasons.
Silk Road also allowed users to buy drugs, weapons and steroids with Bitcoin. The marketplace was one of the first major use cases for Bitcoin as a means of payment and helped Bitcoin to gain further popularity.
On February 9, 2011, Bitcoin reached the price of 1 BTC = 1 US dollar on the Mt. Gox trading platform for the first time.
Satoshi wrote his last email on April 23, 2011. He let Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn know that he had now moved on to other things.
Since four days later Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen announced in the forum that he was going to meet with the CIA, many suspect a connection here.
The Bitcoin price rose from far less than one cent per BTC when it was first recorded to USD 32 in the summer of 2011. Then the first "bubble" burst and BTC collapsed by almost 94% to less than USD 2 - many thought at the time that it was now over forever.
The first Bitcoin halving took place on December 28, 2012, which halved the block subsidy from 50 to 25 BTC. One Bitcoin cost around 12 US dollars at the time.
The Winklevoss twins, who had sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for stealing ideas and became several million US dollars richer as a result of a settlement, announced on April 11, 2013 that they held 11 million US dollars in Bitcoin, which corresponded to 1% of all Bitcoin in circulation at the time. They were probably the first well-known personalities to bet a large sum on the asset. It is assumed that the two struck at a price of 10 US dollars per BTC. On the day of the announcement, Bitcoin was trading at around 120 US dollars. The story is recorded by author Ben Mezrich in the book "Bitcoin Milliadäre" (→ click here).
The Winklevoss twins were the first to submit an application for a Bitcoin spot ETF in the USA. Some time later, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC ) rejected the application for the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust on the grounds that the markets on which Bitcoin is currently traded are largely unregulated.
In October 2013, two FBI agents were able to take Ross Ulbricht, who always worked from a public library, by surprise. They faked an argument in order to gain access to Ulbricht's laptop without it being encrypted by closing it again. The FBI shut down the marketplace shortly afterwards and confiscated a large amount of BTC.
In 2015, Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years without the possibility of early release.
On December 18, 2013, Bitcoin's price slide prompted a member of the bitcointalk forum to write that he would not be selling his Bitcoin. The drunken user mistyped and accidentally changed "I AM HOLDING" to "I AM HODLING", which has since become established in the community.
On February 7, 2014, the largest Bitcoin exchange at the time, Mt. Gox, no longer allowed customer withdrawals. The reason for this was that the Japanese exchange, which was responsible for over 70 percent of Bitcoin transactions at the time, was hacked.
The collapse lasted a few weeks and bruised customers demonstrated outside the offices. The debacle caused the Bitcoin price to plummet. The exchange was missing over 800,000 BTC. However, the CEO of Mt. Gox was able to recover 200,000 BTC.
On April 16, 2014, it was finally clear that Mt. Gox would have to be liquidated.
On January 14, 2016, Joseph Poon and Thadeus Dryja published a white paper on the Bitcoin-based Lightning Network in response to the limited scalability of the Bitcoin network.
The idea of the Lightning Network was close to what Hal Finney already described at the end of 2010 as what Bitcoin would need to scale: a kind of second layer of payment system that is more efficient and where transactions are finalized after a certain time in the main network.
On August 2, 2016, two hackers managed to steal almost 120,000 BTC from the major crypto exchange Bitfinex. That was more than half of the exchange's holdings. The hackers were caught and sentenced some time later.
On May 22, 2017, the so-called New York Agreement took place, bringing together many influential entities such as Coinbase and Grayscale, as well as representatives of the largest mining pools. The interest group wanted to push for a different version of the SegWit update, which would have led to a hard fork six months after implementation, increasing the block size to 2 MB. However, the Bitcoin community prevailed and the participants of the meeting have been ostracized ever since.
The debate about the scaling of Bitcoin probably reached its final climax when the Bitcoin Cash network split off as a hard fork to enable more transactions on the main network using larger blocks. Many well-known people from the Bitcoin world campaigned for this idea. However, Bitcoin Cash turned out to be a disaster and people clearly opted for Bitcoin as it is today to ensure maximum decentralization.
The day is also celebrated in the Bitcoin community as "Independence Day".
On August 24, 2017, the Segregated Witness Updateprobably the most significant soft fork of Bitcoin. The update represented a small compromise in the scaling debate, as it enabled better scaling in the main network without increasing the block size and jeopardizing decentralization.
On December 11, 2017, Wall Street was able to bet on Bitcoin for the first time via CME, the world's largest futures exchange. However, this was only with futures, which ultimately only represent bets on the price and are not backed by Bitcoin.
Bitcoin also emerged stronger from the bursting of the second "bubble". BTC rose from around 160 to almost 20,000 US dollars in just over two years. During this upswing, everyone had heard of Bitcoin. However, the "bubble" burst and BTC collapsed by around 85% and was once again declared dead.
ATT BTC Users: TorGuard now accepts mainnet Lightning Network BTC payments. Ask support for details! #bitcoin #lightning pic.twitter.com/6agWGvc5XM-
TorGuard (@TorGuard) January 8, 2018
On August 10, 2020,MicroStrategy became the first public company to implement a Bitcoin strategy. One day later, it was announced that the company founded by Michael Saylor had purchased 21,454 BTC for over 250 million US dollars.
On February 8, 2021, an SEC filing revealed that the major car manufacturer Tesla had purchased Bitcoin for around 1.5 billion US dollars. On the same day, Elon Musk's company also announced that it would accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.
In response to the announcement, the Bitcoin price rose from 39,000 to 46,500 US dollars that day.
A few weeks later, on May 12, 2021, Tesla stopped selling vehicles for Bitcoin again due to concerns about the increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining.
On 19 February, Bitcoin broke the one trillion US dollar mark in market capitalization for the first time. At the time, BTC was trading at around USD 53,600.
In the middle of the 2021 bull market, Beijing decided to ban Bitcoin mining in the Republic. At the time, China was still responsible for over 40% of the Bitcoin hashrate. When the Chinese Bitcoin miners ceased operations, the hashrate briefly plummeted by around half, but recovered within a few months and has been rising to new highs ever since. Since then, the USA has been the country from which the largest share of the hashrate comes.
On September 7, 2021, El Salvador introduced Bitcoin as an official means of payment, making it the first country to take this step.
One day earlier, El Salvador had already bought its first 200 Bitcoin, making it the first nation to buy Bitcoin as a treasury asset - with more purchases to follow.
Bitcoin was also able to recover from the bursting of the first mainstream "bubble" and rise from around USD 3,000 to USD 69,000 - fueled by the first wave of serious institutional adoption. Then this "bubble" also burst and BTC corrected by around 77% to around USD 15,500.
On November 8, 2022, there was a bank run on FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges at the time. It turned out that FTX had been re-lending customer deposits and was bankrupt. The exchange filed for bankruptcy shortly afterwards and the founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison some time later.
When BlackRock submitted an application for a Bitcoin spot ETF after a number of failed attempts by others, the ETF issue really took off. Not only because the world's largest asset manager now wanted to bet on Bitcoin, but also because pretty much every application BlackRock has submitted since then has been waved through by the SEC.
After a long back and forth, court cases and a hacked Twitter account of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), through which the supposed approval was communicated the day before, the time had finally come on January 10, 2024: the SEC gave the green light for Bitcoin spot ETFs in the US.
This event marked a milestone in Bitcoin adoption and gave the asset further legitimacy. In addition, strong lobbying by asset managers such as BlackRock has since made a Bitcoin ban unthinkable.
