It was on October 31, 2008, that bitcoin’s mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper for the now well-known cryptocurrency. That is exactly eleven years ago today, something that now has been noticed in a thread on the Reddit online forum.
What there and then was presented to the public for the first time was a peer-to-peer based digital and decentralized protocol that could both track and verify transactions on the internet.
The protocol was designed so that all information on the new so-called “blockchain” was completely transparent so that anyone could verify it.
Bitcoin was also based on cryptography, which made the system very secure and prevented so-called double-spending, i.e. paying with the same money twice.
Miners have received $15 billion
Another necessary thing that has underpinned bitcoin’s success is that the network is kept running through a process called proof-of-work.
This means that so-called nodes (simplified: computers) around the world keep the system running by solving cryptographic calculations to confirm and add transactions to the blockchain. In exchange, these “miners”, as they are called, receive rewards in the form of newly created bitcoin.
If we count both created bitcoin and transaction fees, miners have received just under $15 billion since the first block was created in January 2009.
Up over 300 million percent
The invention bitcoin meant that the need for intermediaries, a role that, for example, banks have previously had, disappeared. And since its inception over ten years ago, the cryptocurrency has continued to grow.
For example, bitcoin’s hash rate, a value that indicates the processing power of the bitcoin network, continues to increase and set new records. That is also something that the bitcoin price has done in recent years, something that has gained attention even outside the crypto world.
The very first trading price registered for bitcoin is from March 17, 2010, on the now-closed trading platform bitcoinmarket.com. Then a bitcoin was traded for $0.003.
If you count today’s bitcoin price of $9,120, that’s an increase of an incredible 304,033,233 percent, Cointelegraph writes.
