5 Historic crypto milestones
Despite its relative youth, the crypto-industry,
has had its fair share of historic milestones,
let’s take a look at them.
Creation of Bitcoin
Everything began with a single White Paper.
On October 31st, 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto released
a white paper describing the first cryptocurrency
— Bitcoin.
The white paper was merely a theory.
The Genesis block is where Satoshi, really
put his cryptocurrency where his mouth is.
On Jan. 3, 2009 Satoshi created the Bitcoin
blockchain Genesis Block or Block 0 containing
the first 50 Bitcoins.
Satoshi left a message in the code of the
first block:
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink
of second bailout for banks"
The message referenced an article from the
Times in London dated Jan. 3, 2009, which
detailed banks receiving a massive bail out
from the British government.
Nakamoto’s purpose was clear, to make banks
obsolete.
Now, to put it to use.
First Bitcoin transaction
For a long time you couldn’t buy goods with
cryptocurrency.
On May 22nd , 2010 Laszlo Hanyecz made the
first real world purchase using Bitcoin.
He bought two Papa John’s pizzas for 10
000 Bitcoins or $25 at the time.
Now these pizzas are worth around $100 million.
May 22nd is now celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza
Day!
People soon realised you could buy more than
pepperoni pizza with Bitcoin...
Silk Road
The first online store to accept Bitcoin as
payment was launched In February 2011.
It was Silk Road - also the first darknet
market where users could buy illegal stuff,
like drugs and weapons.
All the transactions were anonymous and made
in Bitcoin.
Silk Road was a very popular site.
In total 9.5 million Bitcoins changed hands
on the Silk Road.
In October 2013 the FBI arrested its owner
William Ross Ulbricht, shut down the website
and confiscated all the Bitcoins.
FBI later sold them for almost $50 million,
enjoying healthy returns from the sale.
After the big drugs bust came an even Bigger
hack.
Mt. Gox hack
In February 2014 Mt. Gox, the largest crypto
exchange in the world at that time was hacked.
850,000 Bitcoins worth half a billion USD
were stolen.
A Subsequent investigation discovered, that
the exchange had been hacked several years
before.
Mark Karpeles, former CEO of Mt. Gox was arrested
and charged with fraud and financial manipulations.
After this incident, new KYC and client identification
measures were developed, allowing more security.
Enough with the closures already!
There was positive news too!
Ethereum, smart contracts and ICO
In 2011 a 17 year old started to see a common
problem in the crypto world.
So many exciting projects but they all needed
their own blockchain to build applications,
the existing Bitcoin Blockchain simply couldn’t
do.
The young man realised that since there was
one internet for everyone, why not one Blockchain
for everyone to build applications on?
The young man was Vitalik Buterin, and in
2015 Ethereum went live to the world.
Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is a blockchain.
Its cryptocurrency is called Ether.
But Ethereum is different from Bitcoin as
it features smart contracts.
Smart contracts allow for the creation of
new cryptocurrencies and digital assets like
tokens.
Actually, thanks to Ethereum, there is now
the ICO - or initial coin offering.
It is a crowdfunding mechanism that is used
by blockchain startups.
It quickly became a very popular way to raise
funds due to its simplicity.
How important is Ethereum to the ICO?
Very.
Its ERC20 tokens became the industry standard,
allowing for the much needed integration of
different tokens.
Now almost all of the ICOs are done using
ERC20 on Ethereum blockchain.
Crypto and Blockchain are emerging technologies
so we expect many more new and exciting milestones
to come.
If we missed any let us know in the comments.
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