The rise and fall and rise of Bitcoin
Bitcoin was the very first established cryptocurrency, however, it was not the first one, as discussed throughout the history section, there were a lot of previous attempts at the creation of online currencies with ledgers that are secured by encryption, examples being B-Money and Bit Gold.
In 2009, the bitcoin software was made available to the public for the very first time, and the mining process started.
In 2010, bitcoin was valued for the very first time in its history. Keep in mind that at this point, bitcoin had never been traded but only mined, so it was difficult to assign a monetary value to the units of cryptocurrency, to say the least.
Then in 2010, 10.000 bitcoins were sold for purchasing two pizzas, and that shined a perspective that cryptocurrency could indeed hold some value.
In 2011, rival cryptocurrencies started to show up due to the increase in Bitcoin popularity. The idea of a decentralized and decrypted currency platform started to catch on, and alternatives were on the rise.
These would, later on, become what we now refer to as “altcoins”.
An altcoin is an alternative digital currency to bitcoin, and the word itself is a portmanteau of alternative or coin. Any other currency besides Bitcoin can be categorized as an altcoin.
The idea behind these altcoins was always to improve on the original Bitcoin design through offering better speeds, anonymity, or other advantages that, in many people’s minds, hold back Bitcoin’s fullest potential.
The first altcoins to ever be created alongside Bitcoin’s success were Namecoin and Litecoin, however, currently, there are thousands of cryptocurrencies in circulation with many of them coming out on a seemingly frequent basis.
In 2013, the price of bitcoin was starting to reach over $1.000 for the very first time. Everything looked fine, except for the fact that it suddenly started to decline, quickly.
Many people and organizations that decided to invest in bitcoin started to receive a lot of losses due to the fact that its price went down to as little to $300, and it would take around two more years for it to reach $1.00 again. These were truly darker days for Bitcoin’s value, but that did not stop the cryptocurrency.
In January of 2014, the World’s largest bitcoin Exchange Mt.Gox went offline and 850.000 bitcoins were lost forever. This is due to the fact that someone, without access, got ahold of a haul that at the time was valued at $450 million.
In 2016, another cryptocurrency came extremely close to getting higher in value of Bitcoin. We are of course talking about the Ethereum Platform. Ethereum uses a currency known as Ether in order to facilitate blockchain-based smart contracts and applications. Its start marked the start of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO)’s as well.
These are fundraising platforms that offer investors the chance to trade on startup ventures within the cryptocurrency world in the same way as they invest and trade cryptocurrency.
In 2017, bitcoin started rising again, growing to $10.000 and above. The market cap as a whole for the entirety of the cryptocurrency industry up to this point grew from $11 billion to over $300 billion, and even banks wanted to investigate ways through which they could work with Bitcoin due to this.
It is around this time that the technology behind bitcoin known as Blockchain sparked a lot of interest from many industries.
Let’s talk a little about investing in Bitcoin.
