How Bitcoin Was Born: The True Story of Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney
The history of Bitcoin goes much further than just a single monetary unit and exchangeable cryptocurrency.
To begin, the founder of Bitcoin is Satoshi Nakamoto. There has been much discussion over the years whether he/she/they are real, but he/she/they have been repeatedly confirmed as real.
How long has Nakamoto been working on Bitcoin? Satoshi has been known to work a variety of hours, mainly in the days from midnight to about 6:00am. He did this as part of a programming exercise. At that time he spent a total of three days to make this initiative a success. After this, he still went on to create many other altcoins, including Litecoin.
The decentralized structure of Bitcoin was proposed by David Chaum to protect against censorship and illegal mining. This idea turned out to be very well received in the real world and the idea was not only applied by Bitcoin but other projects like Bitmessage, Darknets and VPNs.
Bitcoin used to be defined as peer-to-peer cash but as the market increased and grew, the definition has blurred. In practice, Bitcoin is more about gold than currency. Unlike fiat currency, Bitcoin is exchanged through the network directly from one user to another. Bitcoins can even be used through trusted escrow agents, who are responsible for the transaction. You’ll find that Bitcoin has many of the same properties as a digital form of gold.
Because transactions are tracked by blocks, they become harder as the block size increases. This property is a small part of what makes Bitcoin decentralized. However, what gives Bitcoin its decentralized nature is that users are free to choose which blocks to mine.
In the early days, individuals and companies made independent choices. Bitcoin Core developers set the rules for the Bitcoin protocol which Bitcoin miners implemented. However, that changed when large mining pools formed. In 2017, it was announced that there would be a limited block size of 1MB. This will cause a hard fork in August 2020 if consensus can’t be reached. When it happens, it will be the first time any new digital currency has had to deal with the problem of a limited supply, especially a limited supply of digital gold.
Three Bitcoins have been released into existence: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold. Bitcoin became the first one to reach a market cap of over $100 billion but the most recent release has caused Bitcoin to lose 10% in value.