Read on for a brief history of Bitcoin, from its origins in the 1970s to the influence of the 2008 financial crisis, to the recent massive expansion of cryptocurrency and the non-fungible token craze taking over the internet world today.
First things first: what exactly is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a form of digital cash in which unit transactions are recorded on a digital ledger called a “blockchain.” It started as an idea in a white paper in 2008, and in 2021 became the best-performing asset of the last decade with its 9,000,000% rise.
Bitcoin doesn’t involve any bank or government; it’s peer-to-peer currency.
Blockchain technology solves this problem, as it serves as a public record of who owns what.
Because you don’t have to count on middlemen in the same way you do when your money is in the bank, you’re not putting your trust in a single government or company.
Though this may conjure up images of mysterious tech experts operating secretively on laptops, actual humans are not hunched over these computers, physically writing in transactions on the digital ledger.
According to Cambridge research, Bitcoin mining accounts for roughly 0.6% of global electricity consumption, meaning that the Bitcoin economy has the carbon dioxide emissions of a small country.
He argues that “Bitcoin could drive the clean energy revolution” because of “the system’s economic incentives favor clean, renewable, energy.” For example: the bitcoin mining facility Enigma, established by Genesis Mining in 2014 .
Upon visiting the Enigma facility, British photographer Lisa Barnard said it was the loudest environment that she had ever taken photos of.
As defined by the New York Times: “Public-key cryptography is a method for scrambling data in which each party has a pair of keys, one which can be publicly shared and the other which is known only to the intended recipient of a message.
In 1983, he published his paper “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments,” which introduced the idea of anonymous electronic money.
In 1997, British cryptographer and cypherpunk Adam Back invented Hashcash, which uses a “proof of work” system that will later make Bitcoin mining possible.
Bitcoin began as a white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” published by someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto on October 31st, 2008.
Wright, however, is currently suing bitcoin.org, claiming copyright over the white paper that they currently host a copy of online.
After the 2008 financial crisis, people had deep mistrust for banks and the government.
January 2015: Supporters of Ross Ulbricht protest outside the courthouse during jury selection for the case against Ulbricht.
The Silk Road was an underground market hosted on the dark web from 2011 until the FBI shut it down in 2013, primarily for the sale of illegal drugs and fake IDs.
Remember the Winklevoss twins ? They’re the extremely tall, extremely identical Harvard classmates of Mark Zuckerberg who sued the Facebook founder over the origins of the mega social media site, for stealing their idea.
NFT stands for “non-fungible token.” This kind of token is like Bitcoin, except while you can trade Bitcoin and have more of the same thing that represents real money at a varying market value, each NFT is unique.
The deeper concept of NFT art is agreed-upon value and ownership; even if anyone can see, download, print out and hang up a piece of digital art, only a select few can actually own that exact piece.
Pictured: an exhibition of Beeple’s digital art in Beijing, China, in March 2021.
Fun fact: early in the Bitcoin days, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz traded 10,000 bitcoins for two Papa John’s pizzas on May 22, 2010.