10 years of Bitcoin: All you need to know!
You heard that right, it’s been 10 years since the domain “Bitcoin.org” was registered by Bitcoin’s first developers, Satoshi Nakamoto, and Martti Malmi whose identities till date remain a mystery.
Bitcoin and its legacy
The idea of bitcoin evolved when Nakamoto lost faith in the conventional banking system and fiat currency after the 2008 collapse.
Satoshi Nakamoto himself wrote
“The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.”
Bitcoin’s decentralized system has been invented as a means of disrupting the corrupted banking system. At the time of writing, there are 9,602 Bitcoin nodes online.
Growth of Bitcoin over these 10 years
From not being listed on any exchange in 2009 to hitting an all time high of 1 BTC= $19,497.4 in 2018, Bitcoin has come a long way.
The number of people buying, trading and googling ‘Bitcoin’ has only increased over time, reaching record-high levels in Q4 2017.
One demographic issue that always comes up in the Crypto-sphere is the lack of female representation, and the same seems to be true for traders. In fact, data shows that only 8.78% of individuals in crypto are women. While there could be other factors at play, Bitcoin lying at the intersection of Tech and Finance, sectors not known for their female representation, displays the same skewed demographics.
As Bitcoin gains traction among lawmakers and legacy financial companies, the number of businesses, institutions and even banks accepting Bitcoin are rapidly increasing.
However, South Korea, Japan, SEC(USA), India, Switzerland, Canada and many more countries have introduced various kinds of regulations that require all the Bitcoin traders to reveal their identity.
Despite of all these regulations, Bitcoin has already marked its presence in 110 countries, almost 40% of the planet!
At the end of the day, a Bitcoin is worth only what people are willing to pay for it. This is often as much a matter of human psychology as it is of intrinsic value.
Although, Bitcoin has achieved tremendous success over the years the question that strikes every Bitcoin enthusiast is….
Why did the inventor of Bitcoin choose to stay anonymous?
Given the history, in 2007 one of the first digital currencies, E-Gold, was shut down by the government on grounds of money laundering. Also, in the past there were instances where a Hawaiian resident tried to do something in digital currency landscape but eventually was charged with violating federal law and sentenced to six months of house arrest, along with a 3-year probation.
There’s a good reason why the inventors of Bitcoin chose to to stay anonymous. By maintaining anonymity, they’ve avoided all the adverse legal entities, making their anonymity at least partially responsible for the currency’s success.
The vision behind the creation of Bitcoin was to give an alternative to everyone who is not satisfied with the conventional banking system. Only time will tell if Bitcoin will manage to accomplish this.
Root source for this article are InWara’s ICO database and coin.dance
Originally published on Ccx news and The Startup.
