A Brief History Of Cryptocurrency Exchanges
By humanjets on The Capital
The Beginning
Before we assess the current state of the cryptocurrency exchange market, it is useful to first understand how we got here. Further to the release of the Bitcoin white paper in October 2008 and subsequent Genesis Block in January 2009, apart from mining, the only way to acquire bitcoin back then was by trading on forums or IRC, requiring a great deal of trust that the other party would honour the transaction.
As a result, it was only just over a year later when the first cryptocurrency exchange went live in March 2010. The now defunct and little known platform was called bitcoinmarket.com, further to a proposal by “dwdollar” on the Bitcointalk forum to create the first real market for people to buy and sell bitcoins with each other. Early bitcoin users like NLS had proposed a useful pricing system as a starting point — based on the energy requirement for mining, with quotes around 1,500 BTC for $1 at the time. Bitcoinmarket.com, however, provided far greater overall consensus on the value of bitcoin, presenting a price at launch of around $0.003, moving up to $0.05 in the summer of that year, which is about as far as any price chart will go back to.
