From Cointelegraph · By Christina Comben
Eighteen years ago today, pseudonymous cypherpunk Satoshi Nakamoto posted the Bitcoin whitepaper, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, to a cryptography mailing list.
Created to bypass opaque institutions and remove the need for trust in financial transactions, Bitcoin (BTC) has been taking on the traditional financial system since its genesis block was mined on Jan. 3, 2009.
Inscribed in that very first block was a message from Satoshi, quoting a headline from The Times: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” It captured the financial crisis backdrop against which Bitcoin was born.
From its early years to adulthood, Bitcoin has had a tumultuous journey, fraught with controversy, intrigue and downright skulduggery.
As challenging as the journey has been, Bitcoin’s future remains on fragile ground, with the fallout from the $6.3 billion Binance hack, the threat of quantum computing, the acceleration of AI-related cyber threats, and questions over its long-term security still looming.
As Bitcoin celebrates its 18th birthday, it’s now old enough to vote in the US midterm elections, but is it ready for adulthood?
Bitcoin’s early years
Undoubtedly, one of Bitcoin’s most memorable moments was on May 22, 2010 when developer Laszlo Hanyecz sent 10,000 BTC to pay for two pizzas in one of the earliest documented Bitcoin transactions.
The Bitcoin Whitepaper. Source: Bitcoin.org
The day would become known as Bitcoin Pizza Day and go down in crypto folklore as the most expensive pizza purchase on record. The coins were worth around $41 at the time, taking the concept of opportunity cost to a whole new high — those pizzas would have cost $780 million at today’s prices.
Related: 10 of the greatest unsolved crypto mysteries
Bitcoin traded for pennies in its earliest days, but Satoshi understood how that would change one day, writing in 2009, “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on.”
By late 2013, Bitcoin had broken through the $1,000 milestone for the first time, amid growing public interest with the emergence of the Silk Road darknet marketplace.
Yet nowhere do the laws of physics apply more pertinently than crypto; inevitably, what goes up must come down. In February 2014, Bitcoin’s epic run came to an abrupt end when Mt. Gox, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange at the time, suddenly stopped trading and went offline.
The exchange had lost around 850,000 BTC, including customers’ funds, in a collapse that sent shockwaves through the industry, making Mt. Gox an early poster child for the concept “not your keys, not your coins.”
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