Happy Birthday Bitcoin! 10 Facts, 1 Per Year, To Celebrate

Celebrate Bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, and brush up on your Bitcoin history trivia, with 1 fact per year from 2008 to 2018.

Matty Bv3
3 min readNov 1, 2018

By traditional measures 10 years isn’t much of a history. Fortunately Bitcoin, and crypto in general, is anything but traditional. To celebrate the decade-long venture that has been cryptocurrency enjoy these 10 interesting facts, 1 for each year of Bitcoin’s existence.

2008: The “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” white paper was published under the pseudonym ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ (duh).

2009: The first Bitcoin ‘Genesis Block’ was mined, the first transaction was made and the first iteration of the BTC software was released.

2010: The first purchase of physical goods using Bitcoin was made when Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 for roughly $25 worth of pizza.

2011: TIME Magazine published the first mainstream article about Bitcoin while Gawker exaggerated highlighted its use on the dark web site “Silk Road”.

2012: The price of Bitcoin crossed $100 for the first time in April.

2013: The price of Bitcoin added a comma by crossing $1,000 for the first time in.

2014: Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange at the time, ceased BTC withdrawals before shutting down for good.

2015: Former JP Morgan Exec Blythe Masters Swaps Wall Street for Bitcoin by joining Digital Assets Holdings (DA).

2016: Japan Officially Recognizes Bitcoin and Digital Currencies as Money.

2017: Bitcoin’s largest fork to date created Bitcoin Cash shortly before reaching it’s all-time high of $19,783 in December.

2018: So much has happened in 2018 it feels impossible to choose just one fact. But rules are rules so; The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced it’s plan to launch a ‘global ecosystem for digital assets’ dubbed Bakkt “allowing Bitcoin-fiat conversion for consumers to purchase everyday goods with crypto.

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