History of Bitcoin
The following is a list of notable events in the history of Bitcoin.
2008 Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the the Bitcoin white paper on The Cryptography Mailing List at metzdowd.com (Satoshi's posts) describing the Bitcoin protocol.
2009 The Bitcoin network comes into existence on the 3rd of January with the release of the first Bitcoin client, wxBitcoin, and the issuance of the first Bitcoins. Satoshi includes a message in the first block via the coinbase transaction: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks".
2010 The first exchange rates for Bitcoin are set by individuals on the bitcointalk forums. In May, Laszlo Hanyecz purchases two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoin.
2011
2012 BitPay reports having over 1000 merchants accepting Bitcoin under its payment processing service.
2013
2014 “Silk Road”, a goods exchange platform which used Bitcoin for primarily criminal activity, is shut down completely. This is the first example of the Bitcoin public ledger being used in criminal prosecutions.
2015
2016
2017 On August 1st, developers introduce Segregated Witness (SegWit), which modifies the usage of digital signatures in transactions. Miners who oppose this change continue mining the original ruleset, which is renamed Bitcoin Cash (BCH), while the SegWit chain retains the BTC ticker. In December, the price of Bitcoin reaches $4000 and BTC reaches almost $20,000 per coin giving the Bitcoins exchanged for pizzas in 2010 a value over $200 million.
2018 In November, developers of the BCH network introduce Canonical Transaction Ordering (CTOR) and new opcodes to the Bitcoin Cash ruleset. Miners who oppose these changes continue mining the original ruleset, which is renamed Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), while the changed chain retains the Bitcoin Cash name and ticker.
2019
2020 In February, Bitcoin SV delivers the Genesis upgrade, which reverts many changes made to the original protocol and removes hard limits inserted by earlier developers, restoring miner-configurable settings for block size, script size and other consensus parameters.
2021 onwards Bitcoin SV Node continues to receive protocol upgrades, including the Chronicle release which re-enables previously disabled opcodes.
Last updated