- Blockchain Quick Reference
- Brenn Hill Samanyu Chopra Paul Valencourt
- 367字
- 2021-08-13 15:54:58
The history of Bitcoin
Bitcoin is the first and, to date, the most successful application of blockchain technology. Bitcoins were introduced in 2008, in a paper on Bitcoin called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf), which was authored by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Bitcoin was the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency; its introduction heralded a revolution, and, in just about a decade, it has proved its strengths, with huge community backing and widespread adoption.
From 2010, certain global businesses have started to accept Bitcoins, with the exception of fiat currencies. A lot of currency exchanges were founded to let people exchange Bitcoin with fiat currency or with other cryptocurrencies. In September 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation was launched to accelerate the global growth of Bitcoin through standardization, protection, and promotion of the open source protocol.
A lot of payment gateways such as BitPay came up to facilitate merchants in accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. The popular service WordPress started accepting Bitcoins in November 2012.
Bitcoin has been growing as a preferred payment option in global payments, especially business-to-business supply chain payments. In 2017, Bitcoin gained more legitimacy among financial companies and government organizations. For example, Russia legalized the use of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Norway's largest bank announced the inception of a Bitcoin account, and Japan passed a law to accept Bitcoin as a legal payment method. The world's largest free economic zone, Dubai, has started issuing licenses to firms for trading cryptocurrencies.
On August 1, 2017, Bitcoin split into two derivative digital currencies; one kept the legacy name Bitcoin, and the other with an 8 MB block size is known as Bitcoin Cash (BCH). After this, another hard fork happened on October 24, 2017, with a new currency known as Bitcoin Gold (BTG). Then, again, on February 28, 2018, another hard fork happened, with the new currency known as Bitcoin Private (BTCP). There was another hard fork due in November 2017, but this was canceled due to lack of consensus from the community.
However, there is a single major concern of the promoters of Bitcoin, with regards to price volatility and slowing of transaction due to a large number of confirmations required to approve a transaction.