From $0.003 to $20,000: A Look at Bitcoin’s Price Journey
Have you ever heard about digital currencies such as Bitcoin? No, of course you haven’t! At least not, not that you can notice. But if you’re in the business of stock market investing, it’s almost impossible that you don’t know about Bitcoin.
In a nut shell, Bitcoin was the first decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency to hit the scene in 2008, with a total market capitalization of $3.4 billion. It started out as a decentralized, peer-to-peer virtual currency system that took place in a completely digital environment and did not need any banks or central banks for its existence. It was a first in many ways and a black swan in other ways. Let’s take a look at some of the things that make it tick.
The purpose and intention of Bitcoin was to have a completely peer-to-peer digital currency system for people to transfer funds to one another and in return receive value for value. Bitcoin was founded by a man named Satoshi Nakamoto, who submitted a paper to a cryptography mailing list in September 2008 called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” In the course of a few days, there were over 300 emails sent to this list concerning Bitcoin, before Satoshi Nakamoto contacted the other list members via email and requested anonymity in exchange for presenting Bitcoin to the public.
The Bitcoin paper was an amazing, brilliantly written introduction to what Bitcoin was and the potential impact it could have on our money system, and consequently our economy and financial system. Most of the individuals who received the email were so amazed by the paper that they decided to join Satoshi Nakamoto in the work, with some contributing both development and marketing to the project. After the Genesis block was created on 10 January 2009, the “underground economy” knew that digital transactions would soon be a major part of our financial system.
Its birth was the start of the greatest revolution of money the world has ever known. It was neither issued by a government nor bank and its value is not regulated by any central bank.
The meaning of the word ‘decentralized’, as applied to Bitcoin, is that the transaction system for using Bitcoin and that it exists without any central authority or a single point of failure.
Bitcoin came out of a group of people that included a number of computer programmers, Satoshi Nakamoto (the name was chosen to be a reference to Japan’s national currency.