Dear Fellow members, Distinguished guests,

Good morning.

Please look at the figure carefully. What does it reminder you?

This is the value of Bitcoin since its birth in 2008. It is a curve of exponent.

1 Bitcoin = 50,000 USD

It’s possible you only heard about Bitcoin in the last couple of years, while Bitcoin did not come from nothing. In fact, there were a few predecessors who had tried and failed for two decades prior. Then, in 2008, came Bitcoin.

In August of that year, Bitcoin.org was registered. Two months later, On October 31st, a white paper was published: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” This date can be viewed as Bitcoin’s conception.

Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown person or group of people, wrote the Bitcoin white paper. The document outlined the use of a peer-to-peer network (a blockchain), to create a digital currency (cryptocurrency) that would function independently of third parties such as banks or governments.

The white paper described the revolutionary vision of a decentralized digital cash system: secure digital signatures, not requiring the use of a third party, proof-of-work, and hashing the transactions together to form a chain.

The Satoshi whitepaper came on the heels of 2008’s major financial crisis shortly after the closure of Lehman Brothers, which rocked markets and economies worldwide. The timing of this is not a coincidence. Bitcoin was indeed launched as a solution for how we conduct payments.

It is actually January 3rd, however, that commemorates the `birth’ of the world’s first cryptocurrency — the date on which Bitcoin officially came into existence in the practical sense and was mined for the very first time.

On January 3rd, 2009, the Bitcoin blockchain became a reality, and Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block of Bitcoin (known as Block 0), which had a reward of 50 BTC. SourceForge hosted the first open-source Bitcoin client, released on January 9th, 2009, and three days later, the world’s first Bitcoin transaction transpired, with Hal Finney, one of Bitcoin’s earliest supporters, receiving 10 BTC from Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi added a message to the genesis block’s coinbase parameter, which was the headline of the British newspaper, “The Times,” on the day the first block was mined.

The message was: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

This could be to prove the block was generated on January 3rd, 2009, or to highlight Bitcoin being the solution to the global financial problems.

Toward the end of the year, in October, the New Liberty Standard publishes the first Bitcoin exchange rate in the young cryptocurrency’s history, deeming $1 to be worth 1,309.03 BTC.

In May of 2010, Florida-based programmer Laszlo Hanyecz sent 10,000 BTC to a London man in exchange for two pizzas, valued at a total of $25. A couple of months later, Bitcoin’s value finally broke the penny threshold.

Steadily making gains in value after finally passing 1 cent threshold, in February 2011 a major milestone occurred: 1 Bitcoin was worth $1 for the first time.

Bitcoin became the world’s top digital coin when it crossed the $100 threshold in April, 2012. Bitcoin’s price saw its share of ups and downs in 2013, but it passed a value of $1,000 for the first time and was becoming the most recognizable and successful wallet and exchange available.

In 2017 Bitcoin was on an upswing. By October, it was topping $6,000. It ended November at nearly $10,000, and by the end of December Bitcoin hit a peak of $19,783. More and more people and companies began chasing the trend as the price just kept rising. Unsurprisingly, it wouldn’t continue that heady growth.

2018 has been a rough year for Bitcoin users. The price has steadily dropped all year to $6,542.78, a decline of 67%.

Despite a number of setbacks and recoveries, true crypto believers continued to “HODL,” never doubting the day when Bitcoin would rise again. The last few months of 2020 seem to mark yet another very important point in Bitcoin’s history. As we continue to watch the events unfold, it seems safe to say that Bitcoin’s 12th birthday celebration is a happy one indeed. We see the curve in the beginning: 1 BTC = $50,000.

The entire principle of Bitcoin was to build a trustless network that is immune to corruption and censorship. By effectively cutting out the intermediary in a transaction, Bitcoin renders the banks obsolete and can provide a level of security that the current systems cannot.

What makes Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies so effective is that they have no central point of failure. Thousands of nodes maintain Bitcoin’s blockchain across the globe, so even if one node goes down, the network continues to run smoothly on others. This is how Bitcoin has survived, despite multiple attacks on it.

Bitcoin has been running no-stop for the past 12 years, used by tens of millions of people, has a market cap of 1 Trillion and all that while protecting the human rights around world.

I think it is a working proof of the concept of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Thank you.

More information:

Bitcoins are divisible into smaller units known as satoshis — each satoshi is worth 0.00000001 bitcoin.

What Is Bitcoin Mining?

Bitcoin mining is the process of creating new bitcoin by solving a computational puzzle. Bitcoin mining is necessary to maintain the ledger of transactions upon which bitcoin is based.

The result of bitcoin mining is twofold. First, when computers solve these complex math problems on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin (not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground). And second, by solving computational math problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network trustworthy and secure by verifying its transaction information.

When someone sends bitcoin anywhere, it’s called a transaction. Bitcoin miners clump transactions together in “blocks” and adding them to a public record called the “blockchain.” Nodes then maintain records of those blocks so that they can be verified into the future.

When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to make sure that those transactions are accurate. In particular, bitcoin miners make sure that bitcoin is not being duplicated, avoiding double-spending.

In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. First, they must verify one megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as one transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction stores.

Second, in order to add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners must solve a complex computational math problem, also called a “proof of work.” What they’re actually doing is trying to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number, called a “hash,” that is less than or equal to the target hash.

What is Proof of Work?

Proof-of-work is the system Bitcoin’s blockchain network uses to create and hash blocks together. When the computer in a network must use proof-of-work for mining, it needs to solve a complicated mathematical problem. If a computer (called a “node” in the network) successfully solves the problem, it must then be verified by the other nodes in the network. If it does, the transaction is verified and completed, and the miner whose node solved it is rewarded with Bitcoins.

Proof-of-work is an incredibly controversial method. It’s a secure method of verifying transactions, but requires a lot of energy. As more and more people began mining bitcoins, more high-powered mining hardware and graphics processing units (GPU) were created for people to gain an advantage. This consumes large amounts of energy, and with so many Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency miners out there, many are worried about the environmental ramifications. Some cryptocurrencies are testing a proof-of-stake method, which consumes significantly less power.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

One of the most compelling aspects of Bitcoin is the mystery of who created it. The only information the community has is someone (or some people) using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, who is responsible for creating Bitcoin, mining the first block, and maintaining the network’s development in the very early days.

After a short length of time, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared from the ongoing development of Bitcoin and has not made any known attempt to make contact, nor left any clues to his origin. This has resulted in the cryptocurrency community regularly speculating as to who the mysterious persona is.

In 2009, mining Bitcoin had almost zero competition and it was a task that could be done on a CPU. Many miners from 2009 sit on a fortune of Bitcoin, including Satoshi Nakamoto.

Nakamoto owns around 1,000,000 Bitcoin from being one of the first miners. The wallet has never been accessed to this day!

Satoshi Nakamoto is merely a pseudonym. The person behind it, however, remains a mystery.

It remains such a mystery that some think it’s more than one person, doubting that one single person could create something as comprehensive as the Bitcoin network. Still, others have floated the possibility of it being one person, and there are plenty of theories as to who that one single person could be. None have been verified.

Who are the people that some people think could be Satoshi? Some of them have already been mentioned in this article, such as Bit Gold founder Nick Szabo, whose ideas were remarkably similar to that of Bitcoin. Others think it may have been Hal Finney, a notable developer and the person Nakamoto sent Bitcoins to in the first ever Bitcoin transaction all the way back in 2009.

One person is speculated as Satoshi because he tried literally saying he was. That person was Craig Wright, an Australian businessman who not only publicly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto but promised he would provide proof of it. So far, he has not provided this proof.