Happy Birthday Bitcoin!

Ten years ago on Halloween, someone going by the name of "Satoshi Nakamoto" released the bitcoin white paper.

He, she, or they wrote the white paper with the intention of creating the first peer to peer trustless digital payment system.

Specifically, the vision was:

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

(Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/31/bitcoin-turns-10-years-old.html)

Satoshi's vision was unique in that this currency would be trustless and solve the double-spending problem that other digital currencies ran into in the late 90's.

Some history:

Shortly after bitcoin was first introduced on Halloween of 2008, it began gaining popularity in online forums due to its intriguing potential.

Then, in early 2009, it went live with the first "genesis" block being mined in January, sending the first 50 bitcoins out into the world.

Ironically, to this day no one really knows exactly who or what Satoshi Nakamoto is.

There are currently a plethora of rumors surrounding the creator's identity, but nothing has been confirmed.

Even more interesting is that the person(s) claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto mined roughly a million bitcoins in its early days and those bitcoins haven't moved since.

Not one time.

That is interesting because the value of those coins is worth over $6 billion dollars at today's prices.

If it was one individual, and he is still alive, one would think he would move at least some of those coins at some point. Considering they were literally worthless when they were created and now are worth over $6 billion.

Which is a generational type of wealth.

(Source: https://www.icoexaminer.com/ico-news/world-celebrates-tenth-anniversary-of-bitcoin-white-paper/)

Looking ahead:

What might the next 10 years hold for bitcoin?

So far, bitcoin hasn't really succeeded in catching on as a mainstream digital currency.

Thus far it has mostly been used a speculative investment vehicle.

The technology is still not there to be able to efficiently scale on a global level in a way that would make sense to use bitcoin over legacy financial systems.

For that reason, bitcoin mostly makes sense as an investment hedge in a well diversified portfolio, due to it not being correlated to any other asset class.

Over time though, it would not surprise me to see it catch on as a global currency as well.

Once the technology catches up to the hype, it may end up being the de facto currency of the internet.

Here's to hoping.

Happy birthday bitcoin!

Stay informed my friends.

Image Source:

https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/4816/today-marks-the-10th-anniversary-of-the-bitcoin-whitepaper-happy-birthday-btc-.html

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