Bitcoin is the world’s number one cryptocurrency. It is a peer-to-peer currency and transaction system based on a consensus-based decentralized public ledger called a blockchain that records all transactions.
Now Bitcoin was conceived in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, but it was the product of many decades of research into crypto and blockchain and not just the work of one person. It has been the utopian dream of crypto designers and free-trade advocates to have a decentralized, borderless currency based on the blockchain. Their dream has now become a reality with the increasing popularity of Bitcoin and other digital currencies around the world.
Now the cryptocurrency was first published on the consensus-based blockchain in 2009 and in the same year it was first traded. In July 2010, the price of bitcoin was only 8 cents and the number of miners and nodes was much lower compared to the tens of thousands today.
Within a year, the new altcoin rose to $1 and became an interesting prospect for the future. Mining was relatively easy and people were making good money by making deals and even paying with them in some cases.
Within six months, the coin had doubled again to $2. While the price of Bitcoin is not stable at a certain price point, it has shown this pattern of crazy growth for quite some time. In July 2011, at one point the coin went crazy and a record price point of $31 was achieved, but the market soon realized that it was overpriced compared to the gains on the ground and corrected it back to $2.
December 2012 saw a healthy increase to $13, but soon the price was exploding. In the four months to April 2013, the price had risen to $266. It later corrected itself back to $100, but this astronomical increase in price increased its stardom for the first time and people started discussing a real-world scenario with Bitcoin.
It was around this time that I was introduced to the new currency. I had my doubts but the more I read about it, it became clear that currency was the future because it had no one to manipulate or impose itself on it. Everything had to be done with complete unanimity and this made it strong and free.
So 2013 was the breakthrough year for the currency. Big companies are starting to prefer accepting bitcoin openly and blockchain has become a popular topic for computer science programs. Many people then believed that Bitcoin had served its purpose and now it will stabilize.
But, the currency is becoming more and more popular, with Bitcoin ATMs set up all over the world and other competitors starting to flex their muscles in different corners of the market. Ethereum developed the first programmable blockchain and launched Litecoin and Ripple as cheaper and faster alternatives to Bitcoin.
The $1,000 magic number was first hacked in January 2017 and since then has quadrupled until September. It really is an amazing achievement for a coin that was only worth 8 cents just seven years ago.
Bitcoin even escaped the hard fork on August 1, 2017, and has gone up nearly 70% since then while even Bitcoin Cash has managed to find some success. It all comes down to the allure of the coin and the stellar blockchain technology behind it.
While traditional economists argue that it is a bubble and that the entire crypto world will collapse, this is not the case. There is no such bubble because it is an observable fact that, in fact, the shares of fiat currencies and financial transaction companies have eroded.
The future is very bright for Bitcoin and it is not too late to invest in it, either in the short or long term.