Written by Daniel Codella Daniel Garcia
bitcoin.org ethereum.org Twitter ethereumprojectrk
BITCOIN tales of cryptocurrency The Great Recession during the late 2000s changed the lives of millions of people around the globe. Greed, the housing bubble, risky loans, and skyrocketing personal debt created the perfect storm, tanking markets from the US to Asia. Scores of people lost their homes, jobs, retirement savings, and worst of all, their hope in the future. Most of the blame was squarely pinned on US financial institutions. When the government stepped in to provide relief, the bailout came, not for the average Joe, but for the banks themselves. To many, this move was a slap in the face. People were angry, and the stage was set for a revolution.
THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND In August 2008, without any fanfare, the domain bitcoin.org was registered. Shortly thereafter, a white paper was posted entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-toPeer Electronic Cash System” by a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto. In it, he describes the problems of the trust-based model that the traditional banking system is based on and lays out a solution to eliminate the need for trusted third parties: the blockchain. A decentralized and distributed public digital ledger or database, the blockchain is used to record and synchronize transactions across a global network of computers. The entries are public yet encrypted, allowing everyone to view them without being able to alter, revise, or tamper with them. The first use of this revolutionary new technology would be a digital currency. Bitcoin was born. A few months later, in January 2009, software was made public that enabled “mining,” the complex 10
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process by which new bitcoins are created and transactions are added to the blockchain. Satoshi mined the first block on the chain, the genesis block. Inspired by Satoshi’s vision, developers around the world downloaded the open-source software and began mining bitcoins, contributing to its codebase, and talking about its value on forums and in chat rooms. On May 22, 2010, a Bitcoin enthusiast from Florida named Laszlo Hanyecz offered 10,000 bitcoins to anyone who bought him pizza. A man in the UK took him up on his offer and had two Papa John’s pizzas delivered to his door. For the first time ever, Bitcoin was assigned real-world, tangible value. As quickly and mysteriously as he came on to the scene, Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s enigmatic and brilliant creator, announced he had “moved on to other things” and disappeared completely. To this day, no one really knows who he is or if he’s even a single individual. Despite Satoshi’s exit in 2011, Bitcoin continued to gain popularity and grow in value. In honor of its creator, fractions of bitcoins began to be measured in units affectionately referred to as satoshis or sats.
BLACK MAGIC Interest in Bitcoin reached a fever pitch in 2013, and its value surged to over $1000 for the first time. Serious traders were buying and selling bitcoins on exchanges like brokers on Wall Street, the most popular being Mt. Gox. At its height, Mt. Gox was handling 70 percent of all Bitcoin transactions
