Intro
When putting together the pieces of how Bitcoin came to be, its meaning, and your understanding, will start to increase. This phenomenon that already shows signs that are leaving the sphere of personal belief and entering the mass adoption will suffer the same scrutiny that the internet once did.
This mini-series will showcase the most important historical events from the conception of Bitcoin till now. This series will be released in parts, starting with this one, ‘The Times and the Genesis Block’. We hope to introduce these stories and characters to those who do not know what or how Bitcoin came to be, but also retell the tale in our voices.
The Times
Its January 3rd, 2009, Satoshi, is in a small village on the outskirts of London. He walks by a corner store. He stops and scans the covers, something catches his attention and for a slight second, a blanket of anger covers him. It’s The Times headline. In large bold letters, it reads, ‘Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks’. It had been a couple of months that Satoshi would walk past this corner store just looking and waiting for something that would really trigger him, make him finally complete what he has been working on for almost a year. This headline from The Times says it all, it suggests the fact that a supposedly liberal and capitalist system, was rescuing banks. The main currency, that we use on our day to day, has once again lost stability, and that was and continues to be a problem. He runs home and fixes the last touches and at 18:15:05 GMT exactly, Satoshi mines his first block, also known as Genesis Block or Block #0 and alas a phenomenon was born.
I’m messing with you. Kind of. We don’t know where Satoshi saw the first headline. If it even was in the UK or who Satoshi really is. So, we have to focus on what we do know. Which is that the first Bitcoin was mined on that day at that exact time. We know that The Times is, in fact, a pinnacle part of the story, because in the genesis block had embedded text that stated:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
The Genesis Block or Block #0, was the beginning of an eye-opening movement for many all around the world. It helped start a conversation about the problems we currently face in our monitory and governmental systems. Bitcoins’ place of origin is the internet. It is stateless and is unowned.
The Genesis Block
Let us start with some context. For this, we need to go a little bit back in time, before the Genesis block, to the 18th of August 2008, to be exact. A mysterious domain, bitcoin.org, was registered using anymousspeech.com, a site that allows users to anonymously register domain names. On the 31st of October 2008, 11 years ago today, a man who calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto sent out a white paper called ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ to a mailing list using metzdowd.com. We will in a later chapter get into who Satoshi may or may not be. This was a mailing list made up of different supporters and cryptographers. The paper detailed methods of using a peer-to-peer network to generate what was described as ‘a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.’ This was a paper that explained and described the functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain network.
On November 9th, 2008, the Bitcoin project is registered on SourceForge.net, a community collaboration website focused on the development and distribution of open source software.
November 22nd, 2009, Satoshi welcomed members to the new Bitcoin forum, hosted at bitcointalk.org.
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On January 3rd, 2009, at 18:15:05 GMT, the bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of bitcoin which has rewarded of 50 bitcoins. This part we know already.
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
The first open source bitcoin client was released on 9 January 2009, hosted at SourceForge. Version 0.1 was compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio for Windows, it lacks a command-line interface and is so complete that it furthers speculation that it was developed by more than one person. This also includes a Bitcoin generation system that would create a total of 21 million Bitcoins through the year 2040.
The first bitcoin transaction was completed on January 12th, 2009. The first transaction of Bitcoin currency in block 170 takes place between, programmer Hal Finney (Who we will introduce later) and Satoshi. Finney downloaded the bitcoin software the day it was released and received 10 bitcoins for the transaction.
First Bitcoin Transaction On Bitcoin’s Blockchain
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First Bitcoin Block
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First Bitcoin Transaction Hash
000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f
On October 5th, 2009, an exchange rate is established. New Liberty Standard publishes a Bitcoin exchange rate that establishes the value of a Bitcoin at US$10 – 1,309.03 BTC, using an equation that includes the cost of electricity to run a computer that generated Bitcoins. On October 12th #bitcoin-dev channel is registered on freenode IRC, a discussion network for free and open source development communities.
This is just the start of a story, that in time goes deeper. We will introduce you to characters that have fundamentally changed the way people look at our currency today and the stories that follow them.