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HISTORY OF BITCOIN

INTRODUCTION

Bitcoin, a decentralised cryptocurrency on which there is no control of any government of any country. Before bitcoin, there were many cryptocurrencies, but those were not decentralised. And this caused bitcoin to be the first in its category. This is mainly a digital currency, which is not present physically. A more straightforward example to under what cryptocurrency is - Think about making a transaction by Google pay and getting a rewarded of Rs. 5 or Rs 10. Now, this is not given by the government; this is not yours. Then what is this? This is a digital currency, which is quite similar to cryptocurrency. 

History of cryptocurrency

David Chaum was the first to come up with an unknown digital currency named ecash in 1983. And In 1995, he applied it by Digicash. After sometime b-money, bit gold was introduced and described by Wei Dai and Nick Szabo respectively, around 1998. In 2009, the very first decentralised cryptocurrency was introduced. In 2011, Namecoin was created and after that Litecoin. And soon after the success of bitcoin in the market, the market was flooded with many more cryptocurrencies with better features than bitcoin. And this all created a fair competition in the digital market. 

How Bitcoin started its origin?

Under Nakamoto 

On August 18, 2008, a domain name, under the name bitcoin.org was registered. In January 2009, it was made accessible to all by Open-source software. In 2010, the first commercial transaction was made for buying two pizzas. At that time the value of 1 bitcoin was 0.06$.

Under Andresen 

Later this whole system was handed over to Andresen, a lead developer at Bitcoin Foundation. And Andresen decentralised it. The significant early users of bitcoin were black markets. Till 2012, the value of bitcoin kept increasing and decreasing, sometimes dramatically too. 

Bitcoin Foundation 

In September 2012 bitcoin foundation was created to maintain and promote bitcoin's development. Some changes were brought, including releasing Bitcoin-Qt version 0.5.0, switching to LevelDB from BerkeleyDB, and no more seeding nodes by IRC in version 0.8.2.

Bitcoin Core

It was renamed to Bitcoin Core from version 0.9.0. For promoting small transactions, the transaction fees were reduced. OpenSSL was not used for the operation of the network but was used for remote procedure calls. 0.9.1 Version was introduced to remove the vulnerability of the software to a bug. In 2013, bitcoin's value was $13.30, and within one year it increased to $770.

Because of a bug in version 0.8, blockchain was divided into two chains having different rules temporarily. And these divided blockchains were independent of each other. After than many networks were downgraded to version 0.7.The US FinCEN made legal obligations of cryptocurrencies essential. Two people faced some issues in the transaction, and this caused a significant decrease in the value of bitcoin by $190, and within 6 hours it again increased by $84.US authorities seized an account not following its guidelines. 

First government interference and Auction

In 2013, the first time a government organisation, US drug enforcement administration seized bitcoin. After that FBI seized some bitcoins, there all were sold in an auction. 

Prohibition of Bitcoin in China

By the end of 2013, bitcoin was prohibited in China by The People's Bank of China. This caused a reasonable decrease in the value of bitcoin. By July 2014, bitcoin was accepted as a donation in Wikimedia Foundation.

On February 16, 2015, version 0.10 was introduced. On April 15, 2016, Bitcoin Core 0.12.1, was released. On August 23, 2016, Bitcoin Core 0.13.0 was released. The CheckSequenceVerify soft fork was activated in July 2016. Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 was released in October 2016. Segwit was approved on July 15, 2017.

Ban in China

The first step of banning Bitcoin in China was taken in Sept 2017. And it was banned entirely on February 1 2018. This ban caused a significant decrease in the value of bitcoin. It caused fluctuation in the value of bitcoin for a long time.

Conclusion 

The value of bitcoin kept fluctuating; there were hacking issues, theft issues, competition in the digital market because of Altcoins. Then users of the balck market caused limitations by US government too. With time and increasing competition, Bitcoin kept developing. Now, many big organisations are taking payment as bitcoin and are going to take in the future.

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