Filed Under Cryptocurrency O n this day 11 years ago, an anonymous writer under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” published a white paper.The document described a decentralized cryptocurrency, with transactions stored on a digital ledger in a “blockchain,” that would enable people to exchange funds over the internet without needing a financial institution.Fast forward 11 years and the results have been a mixed bag.Bitcoin has a market cap of $167 billion, down from an all-time high of over $300 billion in December 2017.It’s sparked a widespread industry of “altcoins,” and even big names like Facebook have started exploring an asset-backed Libra cryptocurrency .
But mainstream adoption remains limited, its price remains volatile, and environmental concerns swirl around the coin’s energy usage.“After 11 years, it’s safe to say that bitcoin is not a flash in the pan,” Clement Thibault, an analyst at financial markets platform Investing.com , tells Inverse .
“I remain cautiously optimistic about the future of bitcoin, but it may be decades before it ceases to be mainly a speculative asset.” Bitcoin’s price from 2013 to 2019.
Bitcoin: the promise of a bank-free future The bitcoin white paper’s introduction hints at a future that would cut major financial institutions from the equation, giving internet users a way to directly exchange value with each other:
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.The first real-world item purchased with bitcoin is believed to have been a pizza.Programmer Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10,000 bitcoins to purchase $25 worth of pizza from a user of the BitcoinTalk forums.At the time those bitcoins would have been worth $41, so Hanyecz made a notable loss on his purchase.
May 22 is now celebrated in the community as bitcoin pizza day, and wallet manufacturer Ledger has even produced a limited-edition pizza wallet for storing bitcoins.
Bitcoin pizza wallet.A Twitter account, Bitcoin Pizza Tracker , lists the price of those bitcoins every day.At the time of writing, they are currently worth $91 million.In 2017, a surging price led to increased mainstream interest.The price moved from less than $1,000 in January to reach around the $20,000 mark by December.
But bitcoin remains a relative obscurity.It’s rarely offered as a payment method in the United States, and even in places that do offer support like BrewDog in the United Kingdom , the user experience can be frustrating.That doesn’t mean bitcoin’s influence is over, though.After dropping to a price of less than $4,000 in December 2018, bitcoin peaked to $13,000 in July 2019.
During this surge, Facebook announced a new push into cryptocurrency with the Libra consortium.This collection of firms would offer an asset-backed cryptocurrency, governed by an association, that enables those simplified transactions but aims to avoid some of the issues with bitcoin..
