In a way, this blog section of www.usesatoshi.com tracks our journey as we discover a brave new world. One where we rethink what money and currency means, where ‘trustless’ really means removing the need to trust in centralized human controlled authorities but in infallible crypto-graphical mathematics , where universally accepted inviolable ledgers are mirrored around the world to confirm ownership of assets, where digital tokens are tracked on a secure blockchain, and where…..much more, mind boggling disruptive changes are happening right before our eyes. And more…
It all began on a dark and stormy night …
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Actually, it began with a group of members of an obscure mailing list comprising of cryptography experts including some with libertarian leanings known as cypherpunks. In 2008, out of the blue, someone calling himself Satoshi Nakomoto emerges and posts an email describing an electronic peer to peer cash system which does not require third party verification as we know it. The Bitcoin revolution was ignited.
Satoshi’s post to the mailing list included a link to a white-paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Subsequently in January 2009, Satoshi, whose identity remains unknown released open source software which initiated the bitcoin network including the starting block for the blockchain and a means for independent computers to compete for the right to secure the blocks, and receive as a reward, a bitcoin token.
In this way, the bitcoin tokens were mined, the competing computers were the miners and huge mining rigs were set up to mine or ‘mint’ the tokens. Bitcoins were then exchanged as people traded them for fiat currency either in anticipation of Satoshi’s vision materialising eventually or purely for speculation.
In the short last 10 years of the life of Bitcoin, we’ve has seen several ups and downs in its value. We’ve seen the open-source code cloned and forked, sparking off competitive tokens (alt Coins) . We’ve seen scandals where Bitcoin was used in the underworld, the silk road darknet black market, we’ve seen hoaxes and scams, and mega fails in the exchanges. And we’ve seen predictions of doom, skeptics passing it off as a scam, and prices hitting as high as USD 20,000 in 2017 as the focus was shifted to the speculative aspect on the value of Bitcoin. And we saw it’s fall in 2018 back to USD $3,000 and hovering now around the USD 4,000 mark.
Meanwhile, in 2018 we’ve also seen much development approaching Satoshi’s vision of using Bitcoin as a store of value, method of payment and as such a digital currency for the people with the rise and increasing adoption of the lightning network.
Other technologies have emerged leveraging the initial ideas of Bitcoin. Ethereum for example with it enhanced smart contracts enabled programmable money, although Bitcoin had that feature in a limited form. Ethereum spawned a number of applications enabled by funding through the issuance of a custom token in an ICO, similar to an IPO.
…. to be continued