Since 2008, bitcoin adoption has been influenced by a diverse range of factors that have made it one of the most volatile currencies in the world. Yet, despite such volatility, more than 100,000 bitcoin transactions are taking place per day and the volume continues to grow due to the ‘permission less innovation’ provided by bitcoin’s underlying technology, the blockchain.
A block chain or blockchain is a permissionless distributed database based on the bitcoin protocol that maintains a continuously growing list of transactional data records hardened against tampering and revision, even by operators of the data store's nodes.
As the blockchain matures, bitcoin will increasingly resemble traditional financial services, with functions such as retail banking (circles) exchanges (coinbase) and payment processors (bitnet) are being created. But how did it all start off, and where will it go next? Here, we take a brief overview of the major milestones in the cryptocurrency’s brief history and look to where it might be headed in the future.
Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto,]who published the invention on 31 October 2008 in a research paper called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". It was implemented as open source code and released in January 2009. Bitcoin is often called the first cryptocurrency although prior systems existed. Bitcoin is more correctly described as the first decentralized digital currency. 2008
Three individuals, Neal Kin, Vladimir Oksman, and Charles Bry file an application for an encryption patent application. All three individuals deny having any connection to Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged originator of the Bitcoin concept. The three also register the site Bitcoin.org in the same month, over on anonymousspeech.com – which allows people to buy domain names anonymously.
October
Despite the above, Satoshi Nakamoto releases his white paper, revealing his idea for a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash to the world. In his vision, he manages to solve the problem of money being copied, providing a vital foundation for Bitcoin to grow legitimately.
2009
The first block, nicknamed ‘Genesis’ is launched allowing the initial ‘mining’ of Bitcoins to take place. Later that month, the first transaction takes place between Satoshi and Hal Finney, a developer and cryptographic activist. Finney downloaded the bitcoin software the day it was released, and received 10 bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world's first bitcoin transaction.[
Bitcoin receives an equivalent value in traditional currencies. The New Liberty Standard established the value of a Bitcoin at $1 = 1,309 BTC. The equation was derived so as to include the cost of electricity to run the computer that created the Bitcoins in the first place.
2010
The world’s first Bitcoin market is established by the now defunct dwdollar.
A programmer living in Florida named Laslo Hanyecz sends 10,000BTC to a volunteer in England, who spent about $25 to order Hanyecz a pizza from Papa John’s. Today that pizza is valued at £1,961,034 and stands as a major milestone in Bitcoin’s history.
August
Bitcoin is hacked. A vulnerability in how the system verifies the value of Bitcoin is discovered, leading to the generation of 92 billion Bitcoins. The value of the currency – from a high of $0.80 to $1 in June drops through the floor.
“The ‘value out’ in this block is quite strange,” referring to a block that had somehow contained 92 billion BTC, which is precisely 91,979,000,000 more bitcoin than is ever supposed to exist. So instead of the system counting up 98, 99, 100, 101, for example, it broke at 99 and went to zero (or -100) instead of 100. In layman’s terms, someone found a way to flood the code and create a ridiculously large amount of bitcoin in the process.
October
Bitcoin goes under the spotlight. After the hack in August – and a subsequent discovery of other vulnerabilities in the blockchain in September – an inter-governmental group publishes a report on money laundering using new payment methods. Bitcoin, it suggested could help people finance terrorist groups.
November
Bitcoin reaches $1 million. Based on the number of Bitcoins in circulation at the time, the valuation leads to a surge in Bitcoin value to $0.50/BTC.
2011
The Silk Road, an illicit drugs marketplace is established, using Bitcoin as an untraceable way to buy and sell drugs online. Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market, best known as a platform for selling illegal drugs. As part of the Dark web, it was operated as a Tor hidden service, such that online users were able to browse it anonymously and securely without potential traffic monitoring.
February
Bitcoin reaches parity with the US dollar for the first time. By June each Bitcoin is worth $31 giving the currency a market cap of $206 million.
2013
The US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) issues some of the world’s first bitcoin regulation in the form of a guidance report for persons administering, exchanging or using virtual currency. This marked the beginning of an ongoing debate on how best to regulate bitcoin.

Early 2013 saw an extraordinary Bitcoin boom. By the beginning of March, Bitcoin prices were already double the 2012 high, and they rose another 50 percent over the next week. Then on March 6, the price collapsed, briefly falling to $34 before rising again to $45.
A few days later, it happened again. A bug in the Bitcoin software on March 11 caused the price to fall from $48 to $36.50 in a matter of minutes. Bitcoin market capitalisation reaches $1bn. In March 2013, a technical glitch caused a fork in the block chain, with one half of the network adding blocks to one version of the chain and the other half adding to another. For six hours two bitcoin networks operated at the same time, each with its own version of the transaction history. The core developers called for a temporary halt to transactions, sparking a sharp sell-off. Normal operation was restored when the majority of the network downgraded to version 0.7 of the bitcoin software. Once it became clear that the situation was under control, the currency rebounded to near its previous high.
In 2013 some mainstream websites began accepting bitcoins. WordPress had started in November 2012, followed by OKCupid in April 2013, Atomic Mall in November 2013 TigerDirect and Overstock.com in January 2014, Expedia in June 2014, Newegg and Dell in July 2014 and Microsoft in December 2014. Certain non-profit or advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation accept bitcoin donations. (The organization started accepting bitcoins in January 2011, stopped accepting them in June 2011, and began again in May 2013)