The Journey of a Cryptocurrency Trend Founder from Time to Time

The crypto market recorded a bad record in 2022. Bitcoin was no exception, whose value continued to fall throughout the year. Regardless, Bitcoin is still by far the most popular and most valuable digital currency in the world, and its journey to that point was not instantaneous.
At the beginning of 2023, Bitcoin will officially enter its 14th year. Throughout its existence, Bitcoin has gone through various phases of growth, and in this article, we will discuss the history of Bitcoin from the time it was created until it became one of the most dominant digital assets.
History of the birth of Bitcoin (2008-2009)
Long before Bitcoin was born, digital currency experimentation actually existed in various forms, namely eCash, E-gold, Hashcash, B-money, and Bitgold. None of these experiments succeeded in gaining exposure, but according to Cointelegraph , each had a significant influence on the creation of Bitcoin.
Yes, Bitcoin is actually a refinement of various existing digital currency experiments. Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, whose real identity is still unknown to this day, said that Bitcoin is an implementation of the B-money and Bitgold proposals which are popular in the cryptographic community.
The Bitcoin proposal itself was first published by Satoshi on October 31 2008 to a cryptographic mailing list. In his proposal, Satoshi described Bitcoin as an “electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof rather than trust, which allows two parties to transact directly without having to involve a third party.”



To validate transactions, Bitcoin relies on a mechanism called proof-of-work — itself a refinement of the mechanism implemented by Hashcash. The Bitcoin proposal has been well received among cryptographers, especially considering its status as an open-source project .
Bitcoin’s official birth date is January 3, 2009, precisely when the first block on the Bitcoin blockchain network was successfully mined by Satoshi. Then on January 12 2009, the first Bitcoin transaction took place, precisely when Satoshi sent 10 BTC to his cryptographer friend, Hal Finney.
“Bitcoin Pizza Day” (2010)
January 3 may be the birthday of Bitcoin, but a more important date for the Bitcoin community is May 22, which is celebrated every year as “Bitcoin Pizza Day”. Of course, there is an important moment behind this story, namely the first time Bitcoin was used as a means of payment for buying and selling goods in the real world.
On May 18 2010, a cryptographer from Florida, United States named Laszlo Hanyecz expressed his desire to buy pizza using Bitcoin on the official Bitcoin forum. Laszlo was willing to pay 10,000 BTC for two pans of pizza, and on May 22, 2010, he uploaded a photo confirming that the transaction had been successful. Yes, Bitcoin at that time was still that low in value.
Apart from that, this transaction is clear proof that Bitcoin can be used as a means of payment. Whether it is effective or not is another matter, especially if you look at the fluctuations in the Bitcoin exchange rate which can go that far. With Bitcoin’s maximum supply of only 21 million, many people may prefer to treat it as a long-term investment rather than a means of payment.
Satoshi’s disappearance and the Silk Road controversy (2011-2013)
Jump to April 26, 2011, Satoshi officially left the Bitcoin development project and handed over the baton to Gavin Andresen and the open-source community at large. The reason for Satoshi’s decline was never revealed, but what is certain is that this step made the narrative of Bitcoin as a decentralized project even stronger.
In its first two years, Bitcoin struggled to convince the world of its function as legal tender. Unfortunately, Bitcoin was actually used as a means of payment by Silk Road, a controversial black market site that began operating in February 2011.
Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht envisioned his site as a place where people could trade anything without being hampered by local regulations. It doesn’t take long for users to abuse this vision and trade drugs and other illegal goods with each other.
Silk Road was ultimately shut down in October 2013, and its creator was sentenced to life in prison. During Silk Road’s approximately 30 months of operation, there were reportedly around 9.9 million Bitcoins circulating on the site.
The bankruptcy of Mt. Gox and Bitcoin acceptance (2014-2016)
2014 witnessed the bankruptcy of one of the largest crypto exchanges at that time, Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange, or better known as Mt. Gox. First operational in July 2010, Mt. Gox became a very dominant party in the realm of Bitcoin trading in 2013-2014. Reportedly, around 70% of the total Bitcoin transactions that occurred at that time came from Mt. Gox.
But in February 2014, Mt. Gox suddenly stopped the withdrawal feature after its site was breached by hackers. It was recorded that more than 740 thousand Bitcoins were stolen from Mt. Gox, all of which are user-owned assets. March 2014, Mt. Gox is officially declared bankrupt.
Reportedly, an effort to compensate for losses from users of Mt. Gox is still going on today. But one thing is certain, the case of Mt. This Gox sparked a dilemma among crypto activists.

From the user’s perspective, they are faced with two choices: entrust their assets to a centralized entity like Mt. Gox with all its risks, or taking full control of their respective assets — which of course also has its own risks. Meanwhile, from a businessman’s perspective, they may need to better understand the risks involved when building services and infrastructure to support a type of asset that is decentralized from the start.
Entering the end of 2014, Bitcoin began to show its practical value in a broader context. On December 11 2014, Microsoft allowed payments using Bitcoin for purchasing applications and games on a number of its platforms. This initiative is the result of Microsoft’s collaboration with BitPay, a Bitcoin-based payment service provider that has existed since mid-2011.
Jump to October 22, 2015, the European Union officially designated Bitcoin as a legal currency , which means European citizens can trade Bitcoin without having to withhold taxes. For information, the exchange rate for 1 unit of Bitcoin at that time was only around $270.
At this point, many people are starting to see Bitcoin as an alternative to payment service providers like Visa or Mastercard, but not as a replacement for either. The reason is, unlike Visa or Mastercard, the Bitcoin blockchain network is not capable of processing thousands of transactions every second. From there, discourse emerged in the Bitcoin community to create a scaling solution for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin split in two and “The Great Crypto Crash” (2017-2019)
The discourse regarding scaling solutions for Bitcoin ultimately sparked heated debate in the community. What is being debated can basically be boiled down to two things: the Bitcoin block size and the distribution of power in the Bitcoin network.
Those who support the discourse of increasing Bitcoin’s block size believe that by increasing the limit on the number of transactions that can be validated in a block, the overall network transaction capacity can also be increased.
The problem, according to the opposing camp, is that the size of data in the network as a whole is increasing, which means miners have to be burdened with even greater computing power. At that point, individual miners will have difficulty mining effectively, and power in the Bitcoin network will be concentrated in the large entities that control the mining industry .
As a result of the debate, on August 1 2017, the Bitcoin blockchain network was split into two: Bitcoin (BTC) with a block size of 1 MB and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) with a block size of 8 MB.
The Bitcoin exchange rate itself began to grow very rapidly at that time. On January 1, 2017, the Bitcoin exchange rate was at $998. Jump to January 1 2018, the value of Bitcoin has exceeded $13,000. At this point, Bitcoin basically started to show that it had extraordinary volatility, because just a few days earlier on December 17 2017, Bitcoin’s value had touched $19,783.

2018 itself was ultimately known as “The Great Crypto Crash” . There were several factors underlying the crypto market chaos and the drop in Bitcoin’s value at that time. One of them is the initial coin offering (ICO) trend which exploded a year earlier. Inspired by the success of Ethereum’s ICO in 2014, many companies began offering their respective crypto tokens to the public in 2017 as an alternative method of obtaining funding.
Unfortunately, there are more cases of problematic ICOs than successful ones, and this triggers rejection from various parties. At the end of January 2018, Facebook decided to ban all forms of advertising promoting ICOs. Google and Twitter followed shortly thereafter.
Another factor that also influences is the regulations set by a number of countries. On January 22, 2018, the South Korean government established rules prohibiting anonymous Bitcoin transactions. Then on February 1, 2018, it was China’s turn to completely ban Bitcoin trading.
Throughout the first half of 2018, Bitcoin’s value fluctuated between $11,480 and $5,848. Entering December 2018, Bitcoin’s value was approaching $4,000 and continued to fall until the turn of the year.
2019 itself was quite slow for Bitcoin, but in about six months, Bitcoin finally managed to show that it was still the most valuable digital currency. A gift that is quite special but a bit late for the decade celebration.
 
COVID-19 pandemic and sequel crypto crash (2020-2022)
At this point, the narrative of Bitcoin as an alternative means of payment is rarely promoted. Its extraordinary volatility further strengthens the opinion that Bitcoin is not suitable as a substitute for traditional currencies. The market focus has almost completely shifted to the exchange rate.
Bitcoin’s role as an investment instrument strengthened when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020. The economic instability that occurred due to lockdown policies here and there ultimately triggered investors to shift their funds to Bitcoin – which in theory would not be affected by these policies. issued by the central bank.
Not just any investors, but large companies. In August 2020, the United States company MicroStrategy disbursed $250 million to buy Bitcoin as a reserve asset. Then in October 2020, it was payment service provider Square’s turn to take a similar step and exchange 1% of its total assets ($50 million) into Bitcoin.
In November 2020, PayPal allowed its users in the United States to buy and sell Bitcoin through its platform. On November 30, 2020, Bitcoin set a new exchange rate record at $19,860, surpassing the previous record set in December 2017.
2020 also witnessed an important moment in Bitcoin history known as the “Bitcoin Halving” . From the simplest point of view, Bitcoin Halving marks a cut in the number of new Bitcoins in circulation every 10 minutes. In its early years, there were 50 new Bitcoins in circulation every 10 minutes. However, after undergoing three Halvings, the number dropped to 6.25 Bitcoins per 10 minutes.
Since its inception, Bitcoin has been programmed to activate Halving every time 210,000 blocks are created (approximately every 4 years), with the aim of maintaining scarcity and preventing inflation. The last Bitcoin Halving occurred in 2020, precisely on May 11 when the 630,000th block was created.
Moving on to 2021, this period can be seen as Bitcoin’s golden period, with more and more companies entrusting it as an investment asset, as well as its exchange rate continuing to increase. MicroStrategy, which arguably started the Bitcoin investment trend among large companies, announced on January 25, 2021 that it was still continuing to buy Bitcoin , and at that time held approximately 70,784 Bitcoins, equivalent to $2.38 billion.
Then on February 8 2021, the Bitcoin exchange rate touched more than $44,000 . The cause? Tesla announced that day that it had poured $1.5 billion into purchasing Bitcoin, while also announcing plans to accept payments in Bitcoin.
Jump to September 7, 2021, El Salvador officially declared Bitcoin as its official currency alongside the American dollar, making it the first country to take this step. The Bitcoin exchange rate continued to strengthen at that time, even touching $66,000 on October 20, 2021.

Bitcoin’s currently high value is also supported by improvements from the technical side. On November 12, 2021, the Bitcoin blockchain network officially received an upgrade known as Taproot. There are many things that Taproot has improved , but overall, this upgrade aims to make the Bitcoin network more efficient, both in terms of processing time and transaction fees.
It’s a shame that Bitcoin’s golden age didn’t last long. The reason is, 2022 will finally be known as the sequel to the crypto crash that occurred four years previously. In 2022, we will see several crypto projects fail miserably, which then triggers a domino effect for other crypto projects, including Bitcoin.
In May 2022, the crypto world was shocked by the collapse of stablecoin project Terra-Luna. Luna, which previously occupied the top 10 crypto assets with the largest market capitalization, lost its value completely in about a week. Almost all other crypto assets were also affected, including Bitcoin, whose value was almost close to $31,000 at that time.
The situation worsened in June, when one of the largest crypto lending platforms from the United States, Celsius, temporarily stopped withdrawing user funds. As a result, the Bitcoin exchange rate dropped to below $20,000. Celsius was ultimately declared bankrupt in July.
But the most devastating blow that Bitcoin and the crypto market at large received came in November 2022 in the form of the bankruptcy of one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, FTX . Bitcoin’s value also plummeted to below $16,000, the first time since November 2020.
Of course, this is not a sign that the Bitcoin story will just end. Despite its price fluctuations, Bitcoin still has a long way to go. The next Halving moment will only take place in 2024, and this is predicted to continue until 2140, precisely when the 21,000,000th Bitcoin is finally mined and put into circulation.